In which the author relates many unrelated stories of unusual occurences semi-related to modeling

There are two kinds of castings: small affairs in a photographer’s home or studio, where you might arrive to find no queue, an offer of a glass of orange juice or a coffee, and some conversation, and monstrosities that take place in the offices of client companies or magazines. At the big media companies, where you can have three or four castings for different publications, sometimes a single appointment can suck up two hours of your time. All so you can see a casting agent flip through your book for a minute while he carries on a phone conversation with the booker of the girl he’s already picked.

The big castings are good for getting to know models; the little castings are good for getting to know photographers. Some days you get a bit of both.

I struck up conversation with an Aussie model at a big casting recently — actually, I recognised her from an event where I noticed her because she was wearing a dress that I immediately coveted (it’s 10x more splendiferous in person than this crappy picture makes it seem). Sitting down to talk we covered the usual subjects — where were living, to what degree transit strikes suck arse, how cold Paris is this time of year compared to the antipodes. Then suddenly she started talking about dyslexia, and thimerosal, and autism spectrum disorders, and how no kid of hers is going to get vaccinated, unless perhaps the vaccines (particularly the measles/mumps/rubella one) are separated into individual doses, and each dose is tested, and her child is tested, and these tests show the vaccine will be of benefit to the kid. (To me, protection from diseases such as hepatitis B and meningitis seems like a benefit. Especially considering the latter kills dozens of, particularly, children and young people every year in New Zealand. But then…well, you’ll see.)

And then she starts talking about how the “vaccine industry” brought AIDS to the U.S. Big Pharma needed some monkey kidneys to make vaccines, so they had lackeys call up central Africa, and order a big shipment of primate organs. The organs’ former owners had, this model claimed, Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (the primate equivalent of HIV); shoddy, reprehensible and criminally negligent vaccine-preparing business ensued, and AIDS was released upon the unsuspecting American populace in the form of the polio vaccine.

(Interlude: I’ve done some fact-checking, and the germ of this handy anti-vaccination morality tale is probably this real event which had nothing to do with HIV/AIDS.)

But before I came home to the aid of Google, I replied, “Really? Because I just read this thing last week that said patient zero was a Haitian immigrant.” This girl just fixed me with a look that said, Jenna, you are the reason children get autism.

My next casting, the last of the day, was a little one. I rolled up just as another model was going through the courtyard door, and she kindly held it open for me. Public transportation again featured prominently in our conversation — model pastime of the week: comparing whose walk is longest — and by the time we reached the photographer’s apartment door we were joking about how models should strike for a better deal out of retirement. (That’s what the transportation workers want — a guarantee of their right to full pensions if they elect to retire early.) Models retire early anyway, said my new friend, the Swede, we should totally do it. Yeah, show those fashion editors they won’t have models to kick around anymore, I replied.

The photographer overheard our plan and parried back the joke, and before we knew it the Swede and I were sitting on his couch, chatting with him and his assistant about yoga as a spiritual discipline, the importance of lawsuits in the pursuit of social justice in the U.S., why girls quit school for modeling, Wong Kar-Wai, women’s rights, light painting, and law school.

Turns out the photographer’s father is a well-known civil rights lawyer in the U.S., the Swede just dropped out of law school because she ran into her former modeling agent while she was leaving the law library after being told that the reason she couldn’t find any of the books and journals she needed that day was because the law students have a habit of hiding them, stealing them, or just razoring out the most pertinent pages, and I come from a country with no civil legal system or attendant right to sue, so we stayed on matters legal for some time.

I always thought movies like The Paper Chase exaggerated the exasperating, bitchy aspect of law school. Knowing someone chose the renowned competitive fashion industry as the touchy-feely alternative to law school makes me honestly glad I quit wanting to be a lawyer about six years ago.

The Swede, the photographer, the assistant and I sat there eating macadamia nuts and scaring off wide-eyed, undereducated teenaged Russians until it got dark.