Don't Think, Dear by Alice Robb

Author:Alice Robb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

As Emily boarded the plane home to New York, unemployed and in pain, she thought about her skinny colleagues who had kept their jobs, and she wondered if she would still be in Florida if she were taller or thinner. But she resolved to push on. She would use the time off to get her hips fixed—they had been hurting for years—and then embark on another round of auditions. At the doctor’s, though, she learned that the damage was worse than she had thought: years of overuse had worn down her cartilage, and her hips would have to be surgically reinserted in the sockets. But Emily was hopeful. As a nurse wheeled her into the operating room, she thought, I’m gonna feel so good! I’m gonna get another job!

But when Emily left the hospital, she couldn’t walk. Accustomed to having almost total control over her body, it hit her that she would have to relearn the most basic movements. She lay in bed, watching TV, and fell into a depression. She felt like she had nothing to work toward: no show to get in shape for, no company director checking in. Why am I even trying? she wondered. In between Netflix binges, she replayed the cruelest comments she had heard about her body. It was six months before Emily could get through a class again.

As Emily slowly regained her strength, she realized it was performing, not ballet, that she missed the most. She signed up for acting lessons and hired a voice coach, and started going to auditions for anything she could find—from musicals to movies to burlesque shows.

“Cattle calls” are notoriously dehumanizing: aspiring actors complain of feeling objectified and replaceable as they try to stand out among hordes of similarly talented, similarly striving peers. But Emily found them empowering. If she was rejected for a certain role, she didn’t assume it was because of her body; maybe, she understood, the director wanted a tap dancer instead of a ballerina, or a blonde instead of a brunette. Unlike in a ballet studio, everyone looks different; some girls even looked “like her.” (Emily said this as though her physical defects are so obvious they don’t need to be described, and so dreadful that they can’t be named.) But these girls who “look like her”—girls with those unspeakable breasts and hips—wore as little clothing as they could: they came to auditions in sports bras, thigh-skimming shorts, and high heels that emphasized their curves: they seemed proud of their bodies.

I was younger than Emily, still a teenager, when it dawned on me that my standards might be extreme. It was Tyra Banks, the nineties supermodel who reinvented herself as the ruthless host of a reality TV show, who led me to this realization. I can’t remember how I stumbled on America’s Next Top Model—only that I was instantly hooked and slightly ashamed: I was supposed to care about Latin grammar and classical dance, not a vapid modeling competition. Still, there was something uniquely

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