Very Important People by Ashley Mears

Author:Ashley Mears
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

Recruitment

“Hello! Hey! This is Ashley! I’m friends with people in nightclubs, and we’re organizing a big dinner and a party tonight. Do you girls wanna come?”

After a few tries calling up the model apartments with Thibault, these were the best opening lines I had. I was 6:00 p.m., and I was sitting on the floor of Thibault’s bedroom, mobilizing models to join his table that night.

“Who is this?” demanded a tiny Eastern European–accented voice on the other end of the line. I stumbled and offered a rapid series of explanations that sounded more like excuses for intruding on this young woman’s landline. “Umm, I’m Ashley, and uh, I’m friends with Thibault, and we’re trying to get cool people to our party tonight.” Silence. I offered lamely, “We’ll send you a driver?” The young woman said something about being tired, and hung up without further discussion. I exhaled a deep breath.

“Yeah, that’s okay. You did okay,” said Thibault, sitting on the floor next to me with his mobile phone in hand, adroitly texting invitations. Even better, he suggested, would be to use key words like big party or cool party, and sushi. Models love sushi. And I shouldn’t use words like organize.

“These are models. They don’t understand academic words, you know; models don’t have the attention for that. Just say we’re throwing a big party.”

Here we were in Thibault’s “office,” his modestly decorated one-bedroom apartment in Harlem, which was rent-controlled at $815 a month. We could do this work anywhere, but he thought it better to do it in one place and be systematic about it. Earlier in the day we drove to castings and hung around Union Square for lunch with models. During this “free time,” from 2:00 to 4:30 p.m, Thibault mass-messaged the 2,500 people in his phone contacts to let them know about his evening plans. By 5:00 p.m. each day, he headed uptown to begin organizing the night. Now he was sending specialized texts and calling the fifty or so people he knew were in town and were most likely to come out.

His invitations were colorful, flirtatious, sometimes outright silly:

A model is someone who will tell u 2 go to hell and u will still look forward to the trip … Are u shaking it with us at CLUB X 2nite? Dinner b4 at Lux Hotel. Thibault

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