Weird in a World That's Not by Jennifer Romolini

Author:Jennifer Romolini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-04-27T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

The E Word

One day I was on the set of a photo shoot with a pretty brunette actress you know. I was living the goodish life by this point. I had a good job, I lived in a good apartment with an unshared bath, more than one room, and no clowns. I’d stopped paying for the subway in dimes. My on-staff magazine job had loads of enviable perks, and one was that I occasionally interviewed celebrities. Even though the interviews were not long or revealing or deep or serious and were more often focused on trite topics like shopping habits (or, as Avril Lavigne once described our interview, “So this is about accessories and shit?”), getting to do them was a privilege: the assignments were coveted, and it meant the boss trusted you to represent the magazine out in the world. At the very least, it was a chill day out of the office spent waiting for the celebrity in a chic photo studio surrounded by gorgeous people, expensive catering, and the coolest hair and makeup people with the best gossip to talk to all day.*

On this day, the pretty brunette actress didn’t like any of the chosen-for-her clothes, she didn’t want people touching her, and she was obviously not interested in any of the stylist’s suggestions or advice. This was a problem. The actress had a solution. She walked to the clothing racks, picked out one dress, a giant dress, the most-expensive-of-them-all dress, a red gown. And then she insisted on wearing it backward. You don’t have to know a ton about the business of fashion to understand that if a designer lends you their just-off-the-runway gown to be on the cover of a magazine, the designer would prefer that the dress not be on backward, twisted, and lifted up, so it resembles a red fabric tent or the folds of a Shar Pei. But the pretty brunette actress did not care to understand this. Representation was brought over to consult, private conversations in hushed voices were conducted in various corners of the studio, fashion editors went pale, the stylist stomped a foot. They were losing time. WE NEED TO TURN THE DRESS AROUND. The pretty brunette actress sat on the floor of the studio, braless, an unzipped, red-dress puddle of protest. She looked up at the crowd of people staring at her, a crew whose day depended on her, at her manager, and the fashion editors imploring her, and said: “This is my being and my person. I need you to respect my being and my person. This is the way I am going to wear this dress.” The photographer photographed her in the backward red dress. Another dress was hastily introduced, “just in case,” and the pretty brunette actress reluctantly put it on and had her picture taken. The second dress did not look very good. That was the image they used.

Like the pretty brunette actress, we all would like to protect our being and our person against forces that feel invasive, thoughtless, uncomfortable, and even cruel.

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