I also thought about the woman who made me who I am today: Carrie Bradshaw. In season 4, episode 2 of Sex and The City, Carrie is recruited to be an authentic New York Real Person model. She spends most of the episode with a gleeful smile saying “but I’m not a model,” until she’s walking down the runway in a pair of sparkly Dolce and Gabbana briefs alongside Frank Rich and Fran Lebowitz. Stanford tells her, “You’re the modeley-iest of the real people.”
So I went anyway, crossing the threshold from person who wants to be asked to person who wants. Immediately, the modeling agent was surprised—the first time in my life someone was upset that I was thinner than they thought I was.
She ushered me into a room. “So, you’re 17?” I laughed. “Not recently!” This, though, was not the right answer. Pursing her lips, she followed with, “What’s your ethnicity?” I was confident in this answer. “White.” “Really?” “New Yorker.” “Really?” “Midwestern?” “Really?” “Jewish?”
Leaning away from me: “And what are your hobbies?”
“Hobbies?” I repeated the word doltishly. She rattled off a couple—soccer, pottery, baking—as if my apparent amnesia would dissolve and I would remember that I was an avid knitter. “I’m a writer.” “Is that a hobby?” Yes, according to the IRS. “No.” “So—no hobbies.” She capped her pen.
It was a strike against me that I was not curvier, a strike against me that I was old, and now this? Somehow this agent thought I was a non-white plus-size teenage hobbyist. Mentally I scrolled through my Instagram, inspecting photos I’d posted of myself—flexing at Brighton Beach, my Halloween costume as Mrs. Robinson from The Graduate—wondering how I’d so gravely misrepresented myself.
Time to take digitals. Front. Back. Side. I wanted to say, “Stop no! I don’t look good from that angle!” But the point of modeling, of course, is to look good from that angle. It was all very frightening. She explained she would be taking a video of me where I walk around in a little circle and then pose.
As I stuck the landing, hip out, soft smile into the camera, the agent called out, trying to catch me unaware: “What are your hobbies?” My smile became gummy, haunted by the question. I resisted the urge to yell out, “And what are your hobbies?!”