If You Belonged Here

Alices Poses The Model

 Model: Bonsoir!

Alice: Parlez-vous français?

Model: En peu.

Alice: Uh, nope, that’s all I had. Merci, though.

You're called the Model. Are you really a model or do you just like to build model airplanes or ships in jars or whatever?

Model: I'm not currently a model, but I did work as a model in one of my previous incarnations. That is, pre-spawn.

Alice: So, are we talking Sears catalogue or Calvin Klein billboards? And please don’t be afraid to be totally arrogant; Chance was.

Model: The Model is not secretly Giselle Bundchen or Kate Moss, so not quite Calvin Klein billboards in Times Square. But I was in Italian Vogue, a Marc Jacobs runway show, stuff like that. My ex-husband did the Armani campaign and really was on the billboards in Times Square, so my career was always totally inferior in comparison.

Alice: And you have two kids with him right? They must be so adorable.

Model: Correct: two adorable spawn.

Alice: And now one million questions about modeling: first and foremost was an eating order required?

Model: I was already starting with the metabolism of a 16-year-old—since I was one—so on top of that I would navigate the streets and public transport systems of foreign cities all day long carrying a giant bag, in heels, and eat like, a panini for lunch and a little bowl of pasta for dinner. I would have dwindled away to nothing if I hadn’t the sense to fill in my calories by drinking all night.

Alice: In other words, you have the life experience of matron but are only in your very early twenties?

Model: Something like that.

Alice: Growing up fast: good thing or bad thing?

Model: I'm happy with my lot. I have friends my age who are still partying and nowhere near settling down. But most of my friends who are in the same place in life as I am have a good decade or so on me. It's been like that for so long, I can't imagine things being any other way.

Alice: Favorite modeling moment?

Model: I'm sure I should come up with something highbrow and glamorous, but I’m going with getting paid to throw french fries at Mary Tyler Moore on live TV while standing next to Bruce Vilanch.

Alice: Worst modeling moment?

Model: I once did a shoot in the foothills of Mt. Fuji in the winter, with strep throat, in a short-sleeved shirt, skirt, and sandals. It’s no trip on a runway, and it’s not terribly embarrassing, but I almost died of goosebumps.

Alice: So are goose bumps airbrushed or what?

Model: Sure. What isn't?

Alice: You've traveled quite a bit. Have you ever landed in another country and felt like you were home?

Model: I got pretty comfortable with Tokyo, but there's no place like home (click, click, click).

Alice: What city or country do you hope you never have to return to?

Model: Easy: Milan. I'm not sure the smell of Italian dog feces and body odor will ever leave my memory. I’ll happily go anywhere else in Italy, but Milan can bite me.

Alice: Do you anticipate any world traveling with kids in tow? If so, will you be wearing heels?

Model: I’ll take the kids anywhere. And I wear heels to the grocery store. Because Rex, my significant other, is a very tall, very thin guy, so I do what I can to match.

Alice: Rex’s tall without heels though?

Model: 6'7" in his socks.

Alice: No he's not! That is freakishly tall. Jack-and-the-beanstalk tall.

Model: He's never heard that before. Ever.

Alice: Please tell him I said so. He needs to hear it. Tell me what he says.

Model: He says he actually had no idea he was anything but average until this very moment. But thanks for making him feel like a circus freak. He's going to go cry now.

Alice: Or he could just take up basketball.

Model: Also a completely new idea.

Alice:  I'll text you my address so he can send me a thank you note.

Okay, I can't resist. I have one more thing for Rex: can he see over most bathroom stalls?

Model: He says, "I can see over ALL bathroom stalls. I just don't look." Same goes for dressing rooms.

Alice: I might need to devote an entire interview to him because I have a lot of questions about being that tall. Like "where do you shop?” And "have you measured your torso and your legs"?

Model: Alice, you’re fixating. I was warned about this.

Alice: Right. So, please tell us all the secret of high heels.

Model: There's no real secret other than getting a comfortable pair. I have heels I can wear all day and do cartwheels in no problem, and I have heels that I can't stand in for 30 seconds without getting a blister and fainting. You just have to be selective.

Alice: That’s not the answer I was hoping for. What do you do when it comes to jeans? I'm dying to know.

Model: I don't wear jeans.

Alice: W-w-w-w-w-whhaaaat? Get out. And Rex doesn't look over the bathroom stalls?

Model: I wear dresses. Almost exclusively. With leggings or stockings in the winter. Sometimes skirts and blouses.

Alice: Now I'm speechless. Is it possible to do that in freezing climates?

Model: I wouldn't know. I try to only live in temperate zones.

Alice: I like you less and less.

Did you ever get to keep the clothes you modeled?

Model: Mostly no, but it did happen on occasion. Now I mostly shop thrift. Which is why I'm often found in really bizarre prints.

Alice: I take back not liking you.

Polly always says she’d like to be more like you. Any idea why?

Model: She told me it’s because she would never (could never, really) just wake up and decide to go on a cross-country road trip alone—with a two-year-old—and leave that same afternoon. I can and have, plenty of times. I usually wing it pretty well.

Alice: Polly mentioned something about a puking dog, too? Was that real?

Model: Once there was a puking dog. And it was fine. We all had a great time anyway, dog included.

Alice: Okay, so I can conclude that screaming kids is something you handle well. What’s your trick? And don't tell me your kids don't scream.

Model: They scream. They just don't scream as much in the car.

Alice: You stopped attending school in sixth grade, just left and never went back. But now you’re heading toward becoming a doctor, aren’t you?

Model: That’s the general direction. I faded out of school in sixth grade and ended up pursuing modeling, so first I had to go back and get a GED. Now I'm a sophomore pre-med. We'll see. I reserve the right to change my plans at any time.

Alice: So give us one sentence to sum up why dropping out of middle school isn't the end of the world.

Model: Middle school is the deepest pit of hell. There's also something to be said for not being burnt out. Sorry, two sentences. Dropping out didn't teach me any respect for rules. You know, this would be a good place for you to segue Shalom Auslander into the interview—

Alice: I want to mouth kiss you with tongue for that. Did you read the book?

Model: Not yet. Books pretty much have to magically show up on my doorstep in order for me to read them these days. But thanks to your obsession, I hear that just might happen with “Foreskin’s Lament.” (Oh Bookgirl, how I love thee...)

Alice: What’s the difference between a model and a supermodel?

Model: Money. Lots of it. Models make just enough to keep traveling. Supermodels make oodles and have name recognition. And are a species that is nearly extinct.

Alice: Any advice for the young girls out there, like Chance, who want to be models?

Model: Just don't do it. Unless your looks are all you have going for you and you’re a glutton for punishment. If you have anything else going for you at all, and if you dislike punishment, you're wasting your time and talent getting into modeling. But I'm not bitter.

The Dol Is Begging the Question. You Betcha!

 I loathe Sarah Palin as much as the next person. At least, as much as the next, sane person who knows what a tea party actually is. All that ridiculous winking, the ignorance (oh, the ignorance!), and the mean-spirited willingness to say anything about anyone.

So, when I read a post yesterday by BuggyQ on one of my favorite political blogs, it really got me thinking. About The Mean Girl. The Queen Bee. Here's a bit from the post "Mean Girl:"

Here's the thing about Palin for me.  I know her.  I've known her since sixth grade.  She's the girl who pulled down the sleeves of my elastic-topped peasant blouse in the middle of the lunchroom to show everyone I wasn't wearing a bra yet.  She's the girl who stole my best friend's boyfriend just because she could, not because she really wanted him.  She's the girl who all the teachers (especially the male ones) seemed to adore, even though every girl in school knew she was Satan in jellies and Jordache.

Sarah Palin seems to be that girl, skills honed, talons sharpened, wink perfected. She drove me bananas during the campaign, not so much because of her political philosophy (Lord knows she didn't come up with that nonsense on her own, and we've all heard it before), but because I think she got to me in a seventh-grade sort of way. 

She's the girl you didn't want to be caught by in a moment of embarrassment. 

Don't trip and fall or walk out of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck to your shoe in front of her, because she will show no mercy.

I was never the prime target of The Mean Girl at my high school, but I had a run-in with her grownup prototype recently. Dude, it was awful. Seriously. I had no idea I could be so upset by an e-mail encounter with an acquaintance. 

You'd think I'd been de-pantsed in front of the football team.

She started out syrupy sweet, making obnoxious demands, and when I pushed back, the fangs came out. 

So the question is this:

Did you ever have a run-in with The Mean Girl? What happened? 

And, for Extra Credit:

Tell me about how Sarah Palin makes your blood boil.

For even more Extra Credit:

What did you think of Linda Tripp? Yeah, what a bitch, right? Who does that?

Chance is Begging the Question 1

I can remember it like it was yesterday, the Bangles had the number one Top 40 song with Walk Like An Egyptian; Tom Cruise was starring in the number one box office movie, Top Gun, a story about three men coming to terms with their homosexuality.  I mean: Maverick, Goose, and Iceman, really? Like we wouldn't figure that one out.

And the number one thing to hit the charts that year was Chance Lost His Virginity. 

Tess was a year older than I, about two feet shorter, and had a rather large mouth that was completely wasted on me. We had already run from 1st to 2nd to 3rd base so often that I was developing twitching in my fingers. And although we couldn't find paradise by the dashboard light because I wasn't old enough to drive, there were plenty of places we could fool around: art class with hands underneath the table, the library in between R-405.987 and T-456.946, and of course the movie theater on Friday nights. We had no illusions about being in love but only that we were comfortable with each other, and we were on the same social level in our class, which is to say near the bottom.

We made a plan to run for home base after school on a Friday in October.  I packed a blanket into my book bag, hardly able contain myself as I sat on the yellow number-five bus. As I made my way to my locker, I saw her waiting, trepidation clearly written over her face.

 

 "It's raining,” she said with a heavy tone.

"It will stop," I croaked with the pitch hitting somewhere near a dog whistle.

She sighed and I fought with my demon locker, the one I could hardly ever get to open. Then she touched my arm and smiled.

"See you at lunch," she said. I watched as she disappeared through a crowd of jocks and felt smug. Those guys probably hadn't even gotten to 2nd base yet. The rest of the day was a blur, except I never did get into my locker, and it kept raining.

By the time I walked into my last class of the day, I was cursing god, Wisconsin, and the school clock, which I swear was running backwards. But then the rain stopped; the bell rang. I jumped out of my chair and ran for the door. My heart was beating so loud I was sure everyone could hear it.

"Mr. Chance!" called Mr. Adams, my Social Studies teacher. 

No. Not now. What could he possibly want now?

I turned to face him, certain that somehow he knew of my plans. But he only said, "You left your book bag on your chair.”

"Thanks!" I croaked, my voice so high I’m sure the windows were dangerously close to shattering.

Then Mr. Adams added, "I know this can be a really hard time Chance—with all the changes going on.”

You have got to be f#@&ing kidding me. A puberty lecture now?!

"I remember the summer I turned 13,” Mr. Adams continued. “I shot up a foot and sometimes my voice would crack so hard, it would start all the neighborhood dogs barking."

Oh, hell no.

"Mr. Adams, I have to catch the bus now." I sprinted out of the classroom without waiting for a response.

Tess was waiting for me at the back door of the school just as we had planned. We headed behind the school to a large pine forest—I mentioned this happened in Wisconsin, right?—where only a couple of years earlier I spent most of my recesses—alone—pretending I was Jess Aarons  from The Bridge to Terabithia, yearning for my Leslie Burke.

The problem with a pine forest is that, while it’s generally great for a secluded sexual interlude, after a rainstorm the pine needles tend to hold a lot of water. We didn't make it ten feet before both of us were soaked to the skin. It didn't stop us.

We laughed and shivered our way to a small clearing, I laid the blanket down on the ground, thinking about how my mom would kill me if she knew I had taken it. Then we stood there for a moment, looking at each other, the cold making our breath visible.  There were no storybook ogres in the woods, just us. As soon as we were on the blanket, our bodies fell into the familiar routine of where-my-hands-go-while-she-kisses-my-neck and where-her-hands-go-while-I-nibble-her-ear.

I had never been naked outside before and it was freezing. So I reached to pull the blanket around us, suavely dumping about five years worth of fallen pine needles all over us. We laughed as I picked the pine needles from her hair. And when we finally stopped laughing, a look passed between us and I knew it was time.

Now knowing where it goes and how to get it there are two very different things, but before I had time to panic she helped me find my way.  Our eyes never left each other's and what seemed to last for years, in reality, took about three minutes. I give credit to the cold, as future endeavors rarely lasted two. When it was over, I told her I loved her, and that she was so beautiful. I think she teared up a bit because one of those statements wasn't true.

Tess was beautiful and would only get more so as time passed.  We didn't make love again until years later.  And that really was just two friends trying to capture a feeling that had long past. Selective memory has probably made my first time better than it actually was, but I wouldn't trade that memory for anything. Except. Except: That I had fallen in love with her, that she really was my Lesile Burke,  and that her tears had been tears of  joy.

So begging the question is this, if you could, and would want to, how would you re-invent your first time?