Nonsense week

You ever have those days? Of course you do. I’ve been having one of those weeks. To wit:

I arrived at my first job on Monday to spy a makeup artist unloading her miniature city of bottles and potions and tubes. The best makeup artists have a chef’s attention to cross-contamination, making sure that certain tools take the product to their back-of-the-hand palette, and that other, separate tools ferry the product to my skin. (This stops my epithelials getting in the makeup artist’s swag, and stops anyone else’s bodily grossness mingling on my face. Everyone wins!) I knew as soon as I saw this makeup artist setting powder puffs out on the bench that I was in trouble. Powder puffs! Poufs of synthetic fibres designed to suck up cosmetics and reluctantly disgorge them onto skin only with insistent pressing. These puffs were dingy pink and so full of bacteria I swear I could see the pathogens dancing in their crusty crevices. I cringed as the makeup artist started squirting and blending, double-dipping every brush and dousing me with Maybelline Great Lash straight from the tube.

She leaned in with her cigarette-breath to do one more pass with the darkest shadow for her smoky-eye creation. And casually mentioned today making quite a change of speed, since just yesterday she’d been working on a German Playboy shoot.

I know where they put makeup on Playboy models and it ain’t pretty.

Cue, within twenty four hours of my escape from the set and a bout of fervent face-washing, four (4!) angry zits.

And I caught a cold. Said cold wouldn’t ordinarily be cause for concern since it is at the absolute lowest threshold of cold-dom; I have so few symptoms I regularly forget I have a cold at all. And yet! At night, the cold rears up with a vengeance, and as soon as my head hits the pillow some daytime equilibrium in my sinuses is breached, and suddenly my nose is stuffy an my eyes are itchy and I sound like some antique hoover. Forget sleep. I have.

Tuesday night was an apex of my tossing and turning: The last thing I remember thinking was, Oh, fuck, my cell phone says 4:02 and I have the alarm set for 7:30 since I have that 9 a.m. job in that studio on the other side of the city and this means I’ve been in bed but somewhat unsleeping for going on five hours and therefore I am totally, totally fucked.

The next thing I thought was, It is 9:27. Why is my phone ringing? Third thing thought: Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking fuckbags of fuck. (I am extremely articulate in the mornings.)

Stumbling ensued, as did blind grabbing for clothing, as did the stubbing of my big toe. I was out the door in three minutes flat and in the studio by 9:58.

There is no guilt like the guilt one feels when walking in on a roomful of professionals one has kept waiting for a solid hour for no reason other than one’s fundamental borderline incompetence/failure at life. Some people, as they move through this world, are at least able to project the illusion of ease, lightness of being, and general positivity: I am not one of them. I rolled into that job with wild hair, mismatched clothes, unbrushed teeth, and an overriding sense of crushing irresponsibility. I looked for all the world like I’d been out drinking wodka in the club with Ukrainians until 4 a.m., not merely finding a succession of pillow positions that allowed for a few precious minutes of REM apiece. The fashion editor looked aghast. The makeup artist mentioned in passing that, at a job we’d done together last week, I’d been five minutes late to arrive. The photographer said, “Got enough sleep, then?” and went off to hobnob with his assistant.

It’s with no small measure of pride that I report that, even with an hour of hair and makeup, we finished six looks and took a lunch break (punjab chole and roast beef. Yumza!) by our scheduled time of 3:30 p.m. The photographer gave me a hug goodbye. The makeup artist — who did as outstanding a job as she had the previous time we’d been thrown together — and I had a kind of heart-to-heart about the ache of starting off in a new city, and the actor she almost married for a green card, once. The fashion editor? Drove me home. And then she first-optioned me for a three-day shoot somewhere far away next week.

This weekend has already been much better: Ended my casting schedule with a lovely hour-long meet-and-greet with a cool photographer Friday afternoon, found a wide-lapelled silk blazer marked down from $517 to $99 in my size, procured a new mini-tripod for my precious camera, which should increase the awesomeness quotient of the self-taken shots on this blog by at least one order of magnitude. Also! As I walked home from the bus stop this evening, I found a neighbour’s cache of unwanted books by the side of the road.

My haul, in no particular order:

Life: A User’s Manual

A volume containing The Glass Menagerie, Sweet Bird of Youth, and A Streetcar Named Desire

Dubliners

Little Birds

Dorling Kindersley Travel Guides: Sydney (ed. 2000, but whatever, it was free!)

Madame Bovary

Random but awesome-looking cheesy 1980s mass-market paperbacks were, alas, ignored as the above were all I could carry. Lesson: Rich neighbourhoods always have the coolest footpath free-for-alls.

So, let’s hope with a weekend of novel-reading and pretty blazer-wearing, not to mention time for that damn breakout to subside, next week will be looking up.

Meanwhile, a photo:

Jobbing

Jenna’s Model Life has been long on the Life and short on the Model lately. But I have a remedy handy! Welcome to a highlights tour of some of my recent(-ish) gigs. Read on for corpse-impersonation, liberally applied fake tan, and enough furry fringe to make Jim Henson cry tears of wrathful envy.

This photo by Kylie Coutts

Last Sunday, I spent 12 hours jumping around a studio made over with smoke machines and lights as a venue in clothes that were equal parts Ziggy-era Bowie (lace, unitards; lace unitards), Wonder Woman (capes, spangled underwear), and Barbarella (gold leather). The team was fantastic and hardworking, and bless their hearts, nobody even seemed to realise that the joke was on them: Fools, I am enough of a dork that I would have impersonated a rock star purely for recreational kicks! Sometimes I enjoy my job so much, I feel downright guilty.

When I arrived at this job for a European designer outlet mall, the picture the casting director had snapped the day before was clamped to my section of the wardrobe rail. Magda, my superlative Polish co-model, said, “My God! We look like we’ve been partying for a week.” And we do. (But we hadn’t.)

I love that, at the same time as digital technology has made photography vastly easier, cheaper, and more portable, it has also brought us back the sight of funny little men, who, in the great outdoors, hunch under black cloths and over complicated equipment. Even though I’m sure he’s just monitoring settings in Image Capture or backing up to the external HD, I totally imagine this digital tech doing something recondite with glass plates and solutions of silver nitrate and potassium cyanide.

Are those pontoons on my chest or am I just happy to see you?

Australians seem to be obsessed with tanned skin. At every job here so far, there’s come a point where the makeup artist has seen me in the stylist’s first look, wrinkled her nose, and set about rubbing my exposed epidermis with bronzer. And squirts of olive body makeup. And a dusting of deep coppery powder. An editor casting a swimwear layout took one look at me and asked if I would mind getting a spray tan; a photographer this week told me that her herbalist had told her that, after a generation of education on the ozone hole and melanoma, Australians are so fearful of the sun that they lack essential vitamin D. (You can get as much vitamin D as your body can handle with just 20-30 minutes of sun exposure over a week, so I find this claim doubtful.) It’s like Sydneysiders are opposed to girls who look like vampires. And as a result all my favourite t-shirts now have a pinkish-brown cast inside. Sniff.

Oh, hi. Is this the way to the tour bus? *Giggle*

Yesterday I was working for a surfer magazine. I Googled it; I’ve thumbed through the occasional surf mag in my time; I had certain expectations. Denim was an expectation. Swimsuits, I thought, were a shoo-in. Fake tan, duh. Maybe a cute, blonde but overmuscled boy to hang off of. Piece o’ cake.

It never pays to act blasé in this line of work. You see, it seems the duty of finding new ways to showcase surf board bags every month is taxing, and this leads the esteemed editors to come up with some out-of-left-field shit: Such as, dead models in body bags!

Even though it’s my job to not let any concept make me uncomfortable, this immediately (and annoyingly) made me uncomfortable. I asked some questions. I nervously said that, aw shucks, you know, ordinarily, uh, seeing dead women in a product layout might be the kind of thing I would write a letter to the editor about. The phrase “the glamourisation of violence against women” may have issued from my mouth. (Obviously, I am a professional, and any discussion was academic, since I was going to do the job. As I do any job, whether it promotes fur or smoking or really hideous dresses; my role is to make the clothes look good [insert whatever value of 'looking good' the client has predetermined]. Not to critique the client’s choices. But I had to ask. It was only fair.)

The fashion editor laughed and said, “In this spread, you died of natural causes, babe.” Then the makeup artist slathered me with lots of red lipstick and I posed for a beauty shot with a board fin key in my mouth. True story.

Antipodean girl

Oh. And Sydney. Can I just say? Coming back to a part of the world where school uniforms are an adorable commonplace and every kitchen has an electric jug for making tea and traffic drives on the left side of the street and you can order a flat white in any café? Hand in glove.

Also helping my first impressions along nicely is the fact that the view from the balcony of the apartment where I’m staying looks like this:

On top of everything, the weather — sunny with a slight mid-teens (Celsius, baby! yeah!) chill — provides the perfect opportunity to send my impeccably curated range of cardigans into the daily fray.

And there are sunsets. I’m a total sucker for sunsets.

Working tomorrow; report back soon.

What I learned in three hours in the Sydney International Airport arrivals lounge

When I travel for work to a new place, I accept all kinds of coddling I never seek when I travel of my own accord, and sometimes I let it dull my better instincts. I never make the mistake of bringing more baggage than I can comfortably struggle with (once I hauled two goodly sized suitcases, a carry-on, and my tote bag twenty New York City blocks in the late afternoon sunshine; the biggest suitcase lost a wheel halfway there, but I did not call a friend for help or a cab, nosiree, I trudged and heaved and dragged until I felt sweat flowing in runnels down my spine) but I must admit I have developed a reliance on drivers. You know exactly how much they cost before stepping in, they drive really comfy rides, and best and most dangerously coddling of all, they know where you’re going so you don’t have to. The second and third times I need to get back from an airport, I can take public transportation. But my first time in a new city, at the other end of a transoceanic flight, I’m relieved to spot that stranger holding a sign with my name on it and leave the thinking to them.

It’s a method that never had failed me, until I found myself at Sydney airport yesterday morning, at 7:35 a.m., after however many hours of transit six plus fourteen plus two adds up to, with no driver in sight.

All around me, families were reuniting, tour groups were corralling their members, people were posing for pictures while pushing luggage trolleys and savouring their first cigarettes after God knows how long.

Sometime before 9 a.m., I saw a man in his late twenties — someone who looked like he was still test-driving the set piece gestures of romance — surprise a woman with a single red rose in a tube of cellophane. She smiled, as if by reflex, and they hugged awkwardly. A group of several dozen Japanese tourists met, donned matching ponchos, and headed in tired formation out the plate glass doors. I waited so long my flight dropped to the bottom of the first column on the arrivals board; then on to the second; then it disappeared entirely.It was at this point I realised I knew no-one in Sydney. I realised I had no cell phone, no Australian currency, too little American cash to exchange, no telephone number for my Australian agency or booker, and no address to send myself to. All I knew was there was supposed to be a guy with a sign and there was none to be found.

I started to question the wisdom of all this.

There was a computer terminal advertising Free Internet! a little bit further down in the hall. Shortly before 9 a.m., I made the decision to leave the signposted Driver Meeting Point and try to make contact with the outside world.

I logged on and searched my inbox. I found phone numbers for my booker and my agency. I found the agency street address, and Google mapped it. I found the address of the place I was to stay, and mapped that. I sent an e-mail to my booker that notified her of my arrival, calmly remarked upon the absence of a driver, explained exactly where I was in the terminal and what I was wearing. I IM’d with a friend in New York. I waited another hour and e-mailed the booker again. (“I’m beginning to get concerned. Please tell me someone will come and find me here!”) I still knew no-one, had no money, and no phone, and it was dawning on me that the comforts of Internet connectivity — which had thus far amounted to the ability to tell friends too far away to be of any help I was stuck in an airport — were mostly illusory.

I abandoned the computer terminal, and the Driver Meeting Point, in favour of exploring the airport. I hate asking anyone for help, no matter the desperation of my situation. (I’ve always envied those individuals whose sense of entitlement and simple self-confidence permits them to walk up to strangers on the street and glibly, and seemingly without thought for the psychic costs of a refusal, request money, cigarettes, directions, the time, or a dinner date.) I told the friend I had been IMing with that I was going to ask someone to borrow a cell phone, but that was a lie; I had no such intention. I started pushing my trolley towards the other end of the terminal with no plan at all.

I passed a cafe, an unmanned Airport Information desk, a closed bank. I saw a McDonalds and a Krispy Kreme. I brushed my teeth. A couple in their sixties hugged and smooched; he took her suitcase and she turned towards the exit on her four-inch heels. I ate a snack pack I’d thoughtfully saved from the plane. Then I saw a Vodafone kiosk.

Five minutes later I was the proud owner of an Australian cell phone. I got back on the Internet, checked the number, and called my agency. Success! My booker had been in a meeting and hadn’t gotten my increasingly desperate e-mails. She was horrified the driver was a no-show. Get a cab, she said, I will be here to pay for it. In twenty minutes, I was walking up a crunchy gravel driveway to my new agency’s HQ. It was after dinner time in New York but sunny and still pre-noon in Sydney and once I got inside someone made me a strong espresso. I felt better.

Night Light Day Light

Bird brain

Sometimes I get the urge to be crafty.

Friday, I finished my castings in the the garment district — a Bermuda Triangle of tantalising opportunities into which I, and the contents of my wallet, disappear with mysterious regularity — and, as if my feet had a mind of their own, soon enough I found myself walking through the plate glass doors of a notions emporium on 6th Avenue. Reams of trims, ribbons, and laces of every description covered the walls. Inspiration boards showed magazine pages of Actual Designers’ naval-style braid-emblazoned jackets, beadwork appliqués, and endless variations on the embellished jean theme. I knew right then I didn’t have a hope; I could see my evening, and it was going to be an unbroken stretch of nonreturned phonecalls and no stopping for dinner until my obsession had run its course.

Fabric and notion stores, along with public libraries and department stores, have been one of my favourite places to spend an empty afternoon ever since my parents stopped chaperoning my trips to downtown Christchurch sometime in Form 2. I used to spend hours dreaming up new kinds of pants in school, plotting piping insertion and waistband facings between quadratic formulae and Lenin’s NEP. Ball gowns, for those occasions when I was invited to school balls, would suck up months of obsessive sketching, and multiple trips across town for the shot dupion silk or liquid charmeuse that best approximated my mind’s eye ideal. As a seamstress, in high school I often lacked compunction — I thought double-sided tape was a perfectly acceptable hemming aid — but my eye for design was alert enough to keep me from losing heart, and eventually I brought my natural perfectionism to bear on as full a range of crafts as I could manage. In college, I taught myself to knit and took up again the embroidery I’d last taken seriously when I’d been of an age to read Little Women; when I next needed a purse, I bought books from Amazon.com and leather and snakeskin and damn well made one. (And then another. And another. Cow hides are, it turns out, massive! And using an awl and hammer is a kind of elemental pleasure.)

Inside a fabric store, life seems rich with possibilities, and the stakes are low enough that I get to thinking I might just be able to commit to one.

What drew me last Friday was feathers. Feathers like on Alexander McQueen’s runway. Feathers like on my favourite hat. Feathers like on a headband I remember my friend Emma rocking earlier this summer:

I saw a wall of coiled fluffy trims in extravagant colours and my mind went ding ding ding.

An hour later, I left the store with all the elastic, black lace, and feathers I needed — then I raced back to the place I’ve been staying, cued up Wednesday’s Project Runway on the TiVo, and gleefully sized up a set of materials I’d never worked with before.

The notions store packed my findings in little ziplocs. I picked out long, wispy feathers that had downy ends and sea-green tips; short, stubby, brown-and-white flecked feathers sewn into bias tape; more greenish-black short feathers, also bound with bias tape; and a handful of feathers whose emerald fronds had been stripped off, right up to the tip of their dyed-red spines. Yes, I thought. I can make a headband with these.

The wispy feathers I decided to cut up. I separated the fluttery bases from the green tendril tips, stripping a few stray fronds and — bingo! Two kinds of feathers to amuse myself with. I pushed my needle back and forth, adding Krazy glue over my rows of backstitches whenever I was paranoid that the pretties might work themselves free, and once I had a few rows down, I stitched in some of the red-stemmed green-tipped ones for drama.

Then I was home free with the bias-taped rows of green and brown. Sew on two ribbons, a bit of hidden elastic in back, and another layer of black lace to cover up my feather-stitching and glue-dabbing — and I was done.

I wore it out on the town that night. And, truthfully, every day since. I’m wearing it right now with a t-shirt and skinny black pants! I think it’s love.

Now my only question is: What the hell do I do with all the feathers I have left over?

Update: Anyone who wants a headband can PayPal $40 to jenna[dot]sauers[at]gmail[dot]com. I’ll mail it to you anywhere in the U.S. (overseas might cost more for shipping — contact me first). I reckon I have enough feathers to make maybe four more of these, so first come, first served. Caveat emptor: your headband may look different from mine, but frankly it’ll probably be different in the sense of “better” because mine was a blind trial and if anything my technique and results ought to improve with each effort. Caveat emptor again: I say ought to, but this is me we’re talking about, so let’s be real. Yours might be just as crappy as mine. But no crappier, I promise.