One of my favorite commercial experiences was a commercial for Verizon Wireless for Comedy Central. I can usually tell how a shoot will be from the audition. Not always, but often.
At this audition, they actually wanted us to go “big.” These days, the more “real” you can be, the better. So when they asked for it to be big, I was shocked, and I was thrilled. And when I got the word that I had booked it, I knew it was gonna be a fun one.
I arrived to set, anticipating a great day. I had seen from the call sheet I got the day before that the director was a woman. This was really exciting! Kathy Fusco, a seasoned director, had a body of amazing work and I could not wait to play under direction. (A sobering fact: she is still to date the only woman director I have worked with on a commercial in all these years.)
I went into hair and makeup, and there my hopes were confirmed: this was gonna be a campy romp of a commercial. The makeup artist was directed to go all out with my makeup. Remember Faye Dunaway’s look in “Mommie Dearest?” I looked like her cousin when they were done with me. I loved it.
Once in action on set, things moved fast. But I loved every moment of it. My scene partners were great, and I was able to find some space to improvise, which is my favorite thing. Once the commercial came out, I was so thrilled to see that one of the unscripted moments had made the cut.
How about some cheese with that ham?
I left flying high, so happy to be doing what I love. Appreciating the chance to be campy and big. Sometimes it all just flows, and this was one of those times.
I recently got sent to a casting that actually welcomed wrinkles.
(Full disclosure: I am still not sure how I feel about being invited to attend the casting!)
Here is the actual wording of the casting notice:
These men and women are portraying people who were leftover hippies in their youth. They were drug users back in the day; this is how they contracted Hepatitis C. Bright Eyes are important. Somewhat weathered faces would be beautiful.
Now, there are some pretty “out there” notices that come across one’s computer. I have seen some real doozies. The wording used for many women’s roles can be pretty atrocious. (Also, those dealing with race and skin tone.) There is actually a blog that collects such notices, to “out” the people writing such sexist descriptions called Casting Call Woe.
This issue has gotten some press over the last few years, and there has been a commitment by some in the industry to do better. Rachel Bloom took a poke at this with a hilarious-in-a-sad-but-true kind of way in a well-publicized tweet in 2016.
I think the above notice handled things pretty gracefully, I think. It is unusual for “weathered” and “beautiful” to be in the same sentence in the advertising world. Knowing the casting director for that job, I am not surprised that the notice was so sensitive. If only they all were.
I have come along way in choosing to move through the remainder of my time on this planet with dignity, passion, grace and creativity. I am committed to being a part of changing the way our society views aging and older people.
And yet, I get called in for such a casting, and I admit it: I am relieved that I was not cast.
Sigh. I guess I have more work to do around this issue.
Deep within There is a certain part of me Who stills believes Life would be so much better If I'd been born beautiful: A super model, a movie star
Shallow, I know, But that part of me's convinced Nothing sways her She doesn't care that you Can't cherrypick and you'd get All their shit too (and that we all have shit)
She is absolutely sure To be adored for your looks Would beat the rest That being loved for a face or body Is more than enough for her And she won't hear otherwise
This part of me Would make a deal with a thousand devils It would sell my soul For the chance to find out If life really is better for the super stars and models
I've given up trying To win her over to Self-Love Land She cannot comprehend adult logic So I hold her hand And I say "I hear you," then lead her into the deeper waters to play
I stopped drinking in 2001. That’s pretty amazing, considering how much, at one time, I loved to drink. There’s plenty to be amazed about my life since I stopping drinking. Loads to write about. But today, I wanna write about something else.
In the years since then, there are these constantly evolving alcoholic concoctions that are of little interest to you when you are no longer a part of the drinking culture, yet clearly must be of massive interest to the drinking community.
My God, all of the vodka flavors alone! I think in my time there was maybe black currant and lemon. Now there’s lime, lemon-lime, orange, tangerine, grapefruit, raspberry, strawberry, blueberry, teaberry (really?!), vanilla, chili pepper, cherry, apple, green apple, cinnamon, coffee, chocolate, cranberry, peach, pear, passion fruit, pomegranate, plum, mango, white grape, banana, pineapple, coconut, mint, melon, rose, herbs, bacon, honey, cinnamon, kiwifruit, whipped cream, tea, root beer, caramel, marshmallow, and many more!! Wow!
The flavors of tequila. The craft beers! I loved imported beers and bars that carried them. Then, it was less common to find craft beers on a restaurant drink menu like it is today. Then, you’d hunt out a pub that imported your favorites. I even won a contest once by drinking over a hundred imports carried by The Richmond Arms in Houston, Texas. (NOT all in one night, of course.)
What about all of the new twists on drinks that contain more alcohol than the others? Or less, depending on the demographic they are trying to reach. How to make it all look more attractive…must be challenging and fun to figure out new ways and new inventions.
The ad campaigns. The fashionable drinks endorsed by celebrity that sell a lifestyle and promise a dream fulfilled.
All of the above, as I said, are of no importance and therefore little interest to me, but I do find it fascinating from an anthropological standpoint. The alcoholic beverage industry is alive and well! My withdrawal did not make a dent.
But there is one recent alcoholic development that is particularly inventive and amusing.
The slang use of the phrase: Natty Ice to refer to cheap, bad-tasting beer that is cheap but has a higher alcohol percentage, according to the Urban Dictionary.
There actually is a Natty Icebeer —it is Natural Ice, by Anheuser-Busch. And even they refer to it as Natty.
They even offer a history of how they developed this beer designed to be “the best bang for your buck.”
Here’s an unsolicited consumer review of Natty Ice:
Amazing, like I said. I had no idea such a beer existed.
You learn something new everyday. (Even if you really wish you hadn’t sometimes.)
When I was growing up, entering that oh-so-excruciating time known as adolescence, there were only a few jean brands on the market. It wasn’t like today where designer jeans are so much the norm that they don’t even call them designer jeans anymore. There’s just a huge selection.
Not so in my day. There were just three brands: Levi, Lee and Wrangler. Or maybe those were just what was popular in my junior high school in my home city of Houston, Texas.
Everyone wore Levi jeans. Maybe some of the “Kickers” (the label that identified the farmer and cowboy types) wore Lee’s or Wrangler’s. But all the really cool kids, those known as “Popular,” wore Levi’s. So of course, I wanted to wear Levi’s.
And not just any Levi’s. Red-label Levi’s. For some reason I cannot for the life of me now recall, the red-label ones were somehow thought to be superior to the orange-label Levi’s.
This presented a real problem for me. I did not have a Levi body. While most of the other girls looked fantastic in these jeans that were basically men’s jeans, I looked awful. You see, this was before they started making jeans to actually fit a woman’s body. I mean there were women’s jeans, but they were still very shaped to fit a very narrow or boylike form. Most of the Popular girls were quite “petite” and had “atheletic” shapes, so they wore red-label Levi’s and looked terrific.
Me, not so much. If they fit me in the waist, I couldn’t get them over my upper legs and hips. If they fit my legs and hips, the waist was huge.
This was a source of major ego suffering for me. All I wanted was to fit in and to look as good as I could. I already knew I looked different: I weighed more and was much taller than the other girls. I was also very fair and quite shy.
But despite all these external characteristics that I just KNEW made me a social pariah, I was desperate to be noticed and appreciated anyway. I can still recall going to Sears or Macy’s or Lord and Taylor or wherever, only to try on pair after pair after pair of never-fitting jeans. I would leave feeling like a grotesque and misshapen loser, cursing God and the family gene pool that had created me. I felt that I was such a disgusting specimen of the female species.
I soon equated being able to fit in the Levi red-label jeans with being socially worthy. As I could not fit into these jeans, I decided that I was socially misfit.
I decided that jeans were just not meant for me, and neither was the Popular group. So I found some other social misfits and formed my own group. I don’t know that we ever had a name, but we were known to be “party-ers” and sort of mysterious, and maybe even somewhat wild.
I said, “Screw Levi’s” and started to wear a lot of black clothing and red lipstick and nail polish, which at that time was not in fashion in Houston, Texas. It being the 80’s and all about New Age music and Madonna and punk, I also had big hair and sometimes wore lace gloves with the fingers cut off and other “New Wave” kinds of things. I look back at some of those fashion choices and think, oh my, what were we all thinking…but for the most part, I look back and think I actually had a unique and interesting style that was sort of ahead of its time.
But I never wore jeans, and I never felt worthy.
And then, as if that weren’t enough, came The Time of the Designer Jean.
Now, Designer Jeans actually made their appearance in the 1970’s. But they didn’t trickle into the popular culture of Robert E. Lee High School until the 80’s. Suddenly, there were so many more options: EJ Gitano, Jordache, Guess, Girbaud, Sergio Valente, Chic, Zena, and Sassoon. Gloria Vanderbilt! And of course, Calvin Klein.
Oh, those Calvin Klein ads. They poured more poison into my fragile teenage mind-ego, creating even more pressure and myth around the importance of jeans to my self-worth and social worthiness.
Designer Jeans were expensive. They were also still not really made for the Real Woman body yet. Though they were better than the Levi’s, they still did not really look good on my body with its curves and extra weight; my “big” hips and my slim waist and “thick” thighs just did not work in those skin-tight designer blues. At least not in my eyes.
Needless to say, my self-ban on jeans continued throughout my college years and beyond.
I actually didn’t buy and wear my first pair of jeans until I was around 26 or so. It was a big deal for me. Finally, through extreme diets and over-exercising, I had whittled my body into a shape that I deemed worthy of jeans. I had arrived. I was finally worthy.
Well, of course, that was an extremely short-lived triumph. That pair of jeans didn’t make me feel any differently about my body or my self. I was still that girl who felt unworthy and disgusting, albeit much thinner on the outside.
Years of therapy would be needed to create change around my body image and sense of self-worth. I have had to unravel the popular-culture-and-advertising-influenced logic that shaped my fragile-and-emotionally-immature ego-mind. I have had to wake up to the real world and out of the sleep-spell cast on me in a youth spent immersed in television and magazine ads and movies and such to discover the reality that was alive underneath the layers of fantasy. It has been quite a journey.
Today, I finally enjoy wearing jeans, free of all that media-inspired hysteria. Today, there are many more choices. So many brands that actually are made to fit real women’s bodies. Hallelujah!
Today you can find jeans for just about every shape of body. Today, I don’t put a type on my body nor do I subscribe to words like plus-size or thick-thighed or skinny or big-booty or all the other descriptive words that are used so often in popular culture and advertising when discussing our bodies. They tend to be derogatory, and they always assume an IDEAL from which all else derives.
Sometimes, I catch myself comparing my body to that fictitious ideal of the ad world, but not as often and not for as long. I nip that self-torturous compare and despair in the bud when it comes up. My body and my mind deserve more from life than that.
I don’t buy that crap anymore. I know two things to be real and true. Women have shapes, and women wear clothes. Sure, go ahead and ascribe some sizes to clothes to make it easy to categorize and buy them. But don’t think I am going to buy into the ascribing of worthiness or some ideal of beauty (or imply the lack thereof) to any of those sizes. Any of them. I am awake today, and I know better.
Today, my thighs are the perfect size for my body. My ass is too. As are my waist and hips. My body is just perfect. Perfect for me.
You want to know what comes between me and my feeling good in jeans today? Nothing.
Life On The Skinny Branches 