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You should be a model. During my teenaged suburban youth, living on the outskirts of New York City, I heard it often enough to strongly consider it. Modeling represented a short-circuit escape from the stifling hell of adolescence into instant womanhood and an indisputable confirmation of ones beauty, legitimacy, and worth. I sincerely believed models had few self-doubts and were readily accepted by other people and that they were supremely self-confident and had high self-esteem, qualities I knew I sorely lacked.
I felt the first pull toward modeling when I was twelve. My junior high choral groups photo had appeared in the town newspaper, and a local photographer called my home to ask if I wanted to be a model. Would I! I could barely contain my excitement as I answered his questions. In my naivet, I thought I had been discovered, that my chance for escape was at hand. Sensing something was up, my mother intervened, and through careful questioning of her own discovered that he wanted to shoot lingerie on little girls. I protested but eventually agreed that maybe this wasnt the break Id been looking for.
Once awakened to the dream of modeling, I had to live with it. I carried it into high school; it seemed that every girl over 5'7" was hung up on the same idea. My friend Diane was not model pretty. She was blond and slim, however, and her height matched the magic number, so she felt the pull of modeling even more than I (at 5'6", I was beginning to wonder if I would ever be tall enough). We talked about it sometimes during freshman biology lab, when things were slow. We dissected frogs and discussed sending photos to agencies in nearby New York City. We drew amoebas and wondered whether we had it, whatever it was that won an agency contract. We diagramed ecosystems and dreamed of a different life.
Diane and I were acutely aware of one problem, however: our weight. We were both normal girls by medical standards, but everybody knew normal-weight girls are too fat to be models! When our dream came a very attractive girl who already looked like a model, had been picked up by an agency and was to appear in our monthly must-read, Seventeen magazine. Our anticipation was intense a girl among us was to be immortalized! Yet when the story appeared, it sent shock waves through our small circle. There it was in black and white (with color photographs)! The experts had spoken: Gorgeous and skinny Sue Anne was too fat to be a model! Sue Annes coveted modeling job turned out to be a story about how she needed to lose weight if she wanted to model again. I still remember pictures of the diet and exercise program prescribed: Sue Anne eating broccoli, Sue Anne swimming laps. Soon after the story appeared, Sue Anne had a new moniker that rhymed with her last name; she was stuck with Sue Anne Huge for the rest of her high school career.
Of course this meant the modeling prospects for the rest of us mere mortals were doomed. If Sue Anne was not up to their standards, we didnt stand a chance. By the age of seventeen, this realization was less momentous, as Id begun to lose faith in my ability to grow any taller. Still one-half inch shy of the industry cutoff of 5'7", I replaced my dream of escape via modeling with the reality of escape to college.
During those years, a career in modeling took a back seat to plans for becoming an attorney, a professor, an arts professional. There was the occasional pang of jealousy when the local photographer consistently chose my classmate Kelly as a subject. A small-timer with a big head, his greatest accomplishments were the yearly college calendar and an occasional show at the local bank. In retrospect, I realize his creative work with Kelly was amateurish at best, but during our years at a small New England college, Kellys status as a model conferred a distinct aura; she was special, she was the one he chose. She seemed to live a charmed life: A photographers muse had the objective status of beautiful conferred by a reputable source; what more could a girl want?
After college, I moved to the big city: New York. Not to become a model, although the thought still crossed my mind. By my early twenties, the pursuit of cool had become a full-time occupation. By the time I reached the age of twenty-three, New Yorks promise of the glamorous life had drawn me into a career in the arts and an effort to socialize on the New York scene. For the former, I had found a chic job at an arts institute on the Upper East Side. For the latter, I was aided and abetted by my boyfriend at the time, a fashion photographer whom Id met shortly after my arrival in town. My life with him gave models another layer of meaning. I was in their world, if not of it; I shared the occasional banquette with an aspiring model and took inordinate pride in being mistaken for one which I was, from time to time. I even got scouted a couple of times a model agent tried to make my acquaintance in a Miami Beach restaurant; I met another at a party who told me to come by his agency the next day; a third stopped me in the street. I never had the courage to pursue those leads and knew that, at twenty-three, I was already too old to have any kind of career. My boyfriends more intimate knowledge of the world I would have been entering sealed the deal, as he strongly cautioned me against it.
Eventually I did do some modeling jobs: When no funds were available to hire a real model, my boyfriend would toss me into the frame to get a shot of that one last outfit for whichever client he was currently shooting. I also donated my services to some of his friends. I modeled in exchange for products in his friends magazine; a struggling photographer friend shot me to produce a catalog on a shoestring; and another put me in a group shot to sell sportswear. Even though I had this experience, hung out with models, and had gotten to know some of them, I knew I was an outsider with temporary insider status, someone who blended in with the crowd without being one with it. During those years, I got just enough exposure and experience to pique my interest in the world models inhabit. Without question it is a different world.
