Jenna’s Model Life

Taking pictures of the Hollywood 99 Cents or Less store? So Andreas Gursky.

Shopping for groceries at the Hollywood 99 Cents or Less store? So New York Times.

Paying for groceries on credit at the Hollywood 99 Cents or Less store? So trashy.

Everyone I know is having a slow work period. It bites.

I got to hang out with this lovely creature last Sunday, which was two degrees off the record high for the date. I was doing a test shoot where the team comprised the photographer, the makeup artist, and me. The makeup artist also did hair, and unlike most fashion switch-hitters, she was equally adept at both. She and the photographer had pulled an avant-gard dream wardrobe of Prada, Comme des Garçons, and Junya Watanabe. I wore ruffled matador jackets and feathered Ann Demeulemeester things and belts as necklaces and a cute Marc Jacobs dress for good measure.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First I had to make a coffee run, in full makeup, hair becurlered and ready to spring loose as soon as we stepped on set.

(This photo by Tina Cohen.)

The A/C didn’t work in the hotel room where we were shooting, and I already had one layer of dried sweat coating the backs of my legs from an early morning $1 rag sale (finally getting the hang of LA thrift!), but working with such energetic people was a pleasure. Everyone solicited each other’s opinions, and collaboration hung in the air like San Francisco fog (and just as pretty and dramatic). We shot some seven looks in a little over four hours, totally nailing each one, and we still had time to break for dinner.

When the light was well and gone, the makeup artist, the photographer, and I all sat down and drank a Bloody Mary or two and went through the day’s shots. That has never happened to me before: Normally, even in the rare event that your team still stands one another’s company at the end of the day, the photographer is never amenable to the idea of showing his unretouched, raw take. It was all kinds of special.

Missed a casting this morning. Skipping castings throws off my whole day’s game: in the eight-odd months I’ve been in this industry, this is only the third I’ve failed to make (the other two were in Paris: I once skipped a go-see at a magazine based in a Paris suburb during the Métro strike because the line that served the hamlet was not running, and I missed another that trailed at the end of my ten-casting schedule because of an hour-long line at a silly hair casting). Although I suppose sometimes I give the opposite impression, I do take this profession seriously, because it is how I eat. My approach to castings boils down to You Won’t Know If You Don’t Go! so I try to, well, Go.

Throw in residual Catholic guilt, workaholism, an overwhelming desire to share my modeliciousness with the world, and poverty, and you have yourself a heady cocktail of self-directed rage when a $0.50 shortfall in bus fare necessitates an embarrassing stepdown from bus 1 of 2, a mad 9 a.m. search for an ATM, a subsequent search for a corner store to buy a bottle of water to break the $20 the ATM upchucked, a subsequent (successful!) reattempt to board bus 1 of 2, and a final, abortive, fruitless, soul-crushing search for the stop for bus 2 of 2.

By the time I found it, my cell inexplicably beamed 9:58.

The casting ended at 10:00.

It was apparent no vehicle would or could come in time to whisk me there. I pursed my mouth, turned up Iggy Pop on my iPod, kicked at a paper bag straying down La Brea, and turned around to catch bus 1 of 2 back where I’d come from. I would have done an angry dance, but I’m not that cool. Dial the guilt up to 11, for the casting I missed was my first since Friday, and I could really use a job right about now.

Here are some pictures I took at an Indian grocery store I went to for lunch with my friend Sami. They serve a mean chicken curry, plus this spiced okra dish. Since my early May job inexplicably switched locations from the Maldives to upstate New York, I’ll have to get my fill of delicious subcontinent-and-environs foods here on the West coast.

Rice in bags pretty enough to imagine repurposing, like people did with flour sacks in the Depression. One time at Crafternoon! someone made a basmati sack into a tote bag.

hereishwereiputalineofwhitetexttomakethephotoformablahtcorrec

(This photo by Sami.)

Sweets solve even the worst modeling-related guilt.

well it’s been fun.

fun and real entertaining.

i loved all your comments. reading them made my day more often than not. especially you, shelley! you made me LOL, lol!!1

but the gig is up: i’m coming out. my name’s not jenna sauers, it’s amanda-sue pickworth. i’m not from new zealand. i come from an awesome part of the country called…maryland! and i’m not a model. i work for my dad at his office. he’s an accountant and i do filing stuff. in my spare time, i like to work out (i’m on my school’s varsity spelunking team and i do jv cheerleading as well, which is realy good considering i’m only 16!!0 and i like to build stuff. last week i made a really neat endtable where the pedastal base was made of an old, really big, desk lamp. at the moment im using it as a bedside table so it has my laptop and my stack of popular mechanics and casual speleologist. as well as a pad of notepaper in case i come up with a really perfect, like, hinge mechanism for a foosball table or something in the middle of my sleep.

anyway. i did this whole thing as a creative writin exercise for my least favorite class, english, where we were supposed to take on and explore a “literary persona” that’s reallllly different from ourselves. you all probably had that old assignment, to write a diary as if you were a character in a novel? well it’s just like that but you had to imagine the novel as well. and we had to do it for a long time to develop the character. it was kind of a drag but i think i actually learned some things.

since i hate fashion (my mom can barely get me to wear a dress, LOL) and since i’ve never been outside the country (well except once to canada when i was a baby!!), my teacher suggested i make my character someone who loved fashion and traveled alot and came from somewhere far away. since i’m only 16 i also made my character older, so she would be able to do fun things like go to nightclubs. my parents say i can get my licence only when i can do a diagram of a four-stoke combustion engine and i keep messing up the crankshafts. it’s too ironic because i totally would only want to drive a hybrid anyway.

i had a hard time reading all those fashion magazines i had to in order for these posts to make sense. at first i was like, what’s an editorial? isn’t that like in a newspaper? but i sure learned. i think i might even invest in some stella mccartney for adidas gear for spelunking. her clothes seem like they’d be appropriate for dark places under the earth.

so i gotta head to cheerleading practice now. it has been such a weight off my shoulders to not have to keep up this whole charade!! i hope some of you will stil be interested in reading the blog of an honest-to-God maryland teen. this weekend’s project is a mini-table tennis table made out of an old chalkboard. i will post pics!!!