My (new) Ketchikan friend and I did a play together (in July, last month).
She is pretty and has long red curly hair (I think it’s naturally brown, but I digress). The first thing that you will notice about her is that she is pretty and has long, red curly hair. If you pay more attention, you will notice how thin she is but also curvy. If you takes notes, you will see that her clothes all look fabulous on her, even the ones that aren’t supposed to, and that overall she has a great figure.
The next thing you may notice is that she is talented (assuming you are in an audition room with her), followed by funny.
She’s the girl you love to hate, but you can’t because she is also not mean or arrogant. So if you’re threatened by her, too bad. You also have to like her. Life is hard.
She is the girl next door. She’ll go fishing with you and wear a hat while she does it. She probably loves going to baseball games and maybe even likes beer.
Honestly, I wrote her off as a face. By “wrote her off” I mean I casually assumed that we wouldn’t be actual friends. I didn’t dismiss her personhood, her ability to feel things or the fact that she has probably lost a pet in her life and it grieved her deeply.
Except that I did, a little bit, because I decided I didn’t want to be next to someone that strikingly pretty. You know, if I stand too close to the sun I get burnt. It sounds like I am throwing a pity party but I mean this totally truthfully. I don’t go unnoticed on the streets as an unattractive person, in fact, I’d say I get noticed as being attractive. BUT it’s not never gotten me into a club before everyone else, or frozen someone dead in their tracks or won me tickets. You get the picture- life isn’t fair, you learned that right? Well it’s not fair that some are fairer than others. But it is still the way it is.Would you disagree? And if you identify with one side of this equation (my side, in this case) you can empathize with how distracting, disheartening and downright disappointing it is to be Jessie Spano next to Kelly Kapowski. What’s worse: there’s an unspoken hierarchy in the world of women, and more than likely for men though it be different.
But we all fall somewhere on the attraction scale in any given circumstance.
There may be dispute over who ranks above who in the middle, but there is no question who is on top. You can remember her name from middle school RIGHT NOW.
This girl is that girl. The one at the top. As luck would have it, I sat on a couch with her and heard more of her story.
In addition to the fact that we have a good mutual friend, who was also in the play, my (guy) friend and coworker really likes her. So I have a vested interest in getting to know her better.
“Tell me about your life!
“Well, I mean, what would you like to know?” (This is how most getting-to-know-yous start with me. Or I say “So like what’s your story?! Which garners the same reaction).
She works in Alaska (which I obvi knew) because she wanted an adventure. Circumstances in her life took a major turn in LA, where she calls home, so it was good for her to get away for the summer season. We got into this in more detail which I won’t share here but it’s more than reason enough to seek out change of scenery.
“So what does your day-to-day life look like?”
“Well what I really like about my life there is that every day is so different. When I finish a project, I move on to a whole different thing.”
“But what are the staples of your day in LA?”
“I love it. I live downtown by myself. I’m in walking distance of so many places I like” (forgive me, this isn’t verbatim but it is the detail of what she said without the exact packaging).
“So what does work look like for you?”
“I wake up each morning and submit.” “Then I usually go to auditions. I also teach (I can’t remember but I think she teaches something).”
“I usually get more modeling work than acting work, but I do get some commercials.”
OK, booking work. We’ve made it to The Sorting Ceremony, the fork in the road. She’s talking about “her work.”
Is she a diva, is she cool but still not someone I can relate to, or is she human (by my standards?) Gryffindor, Slytherin, or one of the other ones? This is the part where you think I’m a jerk, and I don’t blame you, but it’s honest.
She went into a story about how she arrived to LA, looking for work.
I got in a car accident and broke my arm. I went to an audition and I got a callback even though I really didn’t think I would get the part, and it was the best thing that ever happened. We worked so hard and we put the show up and it ran over for over (insert shocking amount of time longer than expected, to sold out crowds). It was a show that involved creative movement and choreography, but involved a deeper empathy with a message.
But before that, she told me about her “aha moment” when she was at a shoot for a car commercial. Her job was literally to sit in a car, next to a man and be a pretty face. She sat there for hours. She had this moment where she looked over at the guy next to her and thought “Is this it?”
And it came into focus. She became a picture of a person who resides inside of a beautiful body.
It’s lucky for the person she is, that she can reside in such a beautiful specimen of a body, but it belies her in more ways than one.
I left the conversation feeling like a jerk, feeling inspired, and being reminded that beautiful people can live inside beautiful bodies. And there’s enough beauty to go around.
