Tuesday, September 8, 2009

The Boat Follows to NYC

Short tangent:

Today I helped my current roommate, who is a fashion designer (not obvious), with her photo shoot. Everyone there is very blase and over the whole thing. No one really wants to talk about how gorgeous the 19 (18?) year old Polish model is, or how strange that her job is actually kinda hard and seems totally boring but she is really good at it. Or how she looks like a terrifying and sick person in front of you, but is gorgeous in every photo. Or how the photos make her look like she has secrets and elegance and perfection, and the actual person made you think "are you bored?" and "do you wish more people talked to you?" and "are your feet bothering you?" She did very serious model poses and did not laugh and looked gorgeous. Like she pouted her lips and stood like Audrey Hepburn and stared into the distance. Also, I saw her underwear and nipples through her shirt. When she smiled for real, she looked kinda weird and like she was 9. A 50-ish older man met her and said "you should go to Paris. Go to Paris for the shows. Are you going to to go Paris?" immediately after she basically whispered that her name was Irina. That was a totally confusing morning. Maybe modeling plays perfectly into the character of an eastern european? I could never ever do that job. Which means part of me somewhere thought "I think I could be a model if I were ever really REALLY broke" which is insane.

I bring this up, because it is here that I met the hair and makeup woman, a fun, punk rock lady from Long Island named Teena. She wore silver Doc Martens and had fun tri-color hairdresser hair. People ask me where I'm from and I say "well, LA kinda" then explain the ship and the flapping around all over the place. People have various reactions, I did not expect her to get hugely excited and say "well, I'm part of the Cary Grant Fan Club." She took a 3 day cruise from Long Beach to Encenada on Royal Caribbean. This is usually a bachelorette/drinking run, but she didn't see any of that because she was "just with [her] fan club." 30 people, cruising together, and celebrating Cary Grant. I discovered he has 72 films (she has seen 71) and he was known for cruising on the Queen Mary. To the point that Teena spent a night on the Queen Mary in Long Beach and took a picture with the cut out of Cary Grant.

Boat!