It Looked Different on the Model: Epic Tales of Impending Shame and Infamy - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laurie Notaro has been fired from seven jobs, laid off from three, and voluntarily liberated from one. Despite all that, she has managed to write a number of New York Times bestselling essay collections. She lives with her husband in Oregon, where—according to her mother, who refuses to visit—she sleeps in a trailer in the woods.

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Let It Bleed

The shirt was so pretty.

               It had a little Peter Pan collar, and lining the placket were pintucks down the front, which were then framed by delicate little ruffles. The short puffed sleeves were like no other I had ever seen, almost Victorian but very casual and breezy. It was absolutely adorable.

So I went ahead and made mistake #1:

I picked up the price tag, which revealed a nugget of information that made my heart skip a beat—it was on sale. And while I could easily qualify for a conservatorship based on my math skills alone, I can divide stuff in half and am right almost 60 percent of the time, and in this case, that was dangerous enough for me to move on to mistake #2:

I imagined myself in it.

Of course, my imagination stars Laurie Circa 1994 and not Present-Day Laurie. Laurie Circa 1994, it also bears mentioning, is a Frankenstein-y hybrid of box-office movie posters and “Who Wore It Better” photos from Us magazine, which my mother appears to have a lifetime subscription to. This fantastical altered image consists of Uma Thurman’s Pulp Fiction figure, Andie MacDowell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral hair, and a Julia Roberts I Love Trouble smile. She not only looks cute in everything, she looks adorable. Laurie Circa 1994 also pictured herself in fifteen years as an editor at some hip magazine, high-powered enough to negotiate in her hiring package for her own bathroom that was complete with password activation and soundproofing. She never truthfully saw herself eating a fiber bar and a questionable banana for lunch right after checking to see if the whitehead on her nose had come back or if the yard guy would see her in her workout clothes, complete with her “Workin’ for the Weekend” headband, which she felt forced to apologize for. Laurie Circa 1994 would have been disappointed that Present-Day Laurie, in the course of a workday, would easily be obsessed trying to outbid “ChuckyPup” on eBay for a pink dog parka; would scrawl notes that say, “Your car alarm goes off constantly and is irritating to those who work at home and pay taxes on this street. Park somewhere else; and your car, by the way, is a stupid color. Who would buy a yellow car? Who? It looks like you drive a huge banana.” and stick them on the windshield of a particularly annoying Kia; or, for that matter would ever spend three consecutive hours looking in the mirror while employing six different sources of light trying to find one fugitive jowl hair. Things haven’t exactly turned out the way Laurie Circa 1994 planned, even though, to Present-Day Laurie’s benefit, if I feel like going to the bathroom at 2:30 p.m., I can do it with the door open should I prefer, although the potential to set off a car alarm is vastly upsetting.

In my head, Laurie Circa 1994 looked adorable enough in this shirt to actually brighten the day of not only herself but of everyone around her, in those puffy sleeves, pintuck details, and slight, flirty ruffles. And with that vision in mind—as Uma Thurman’s body walked down the street, accompanied by a dog in a pink parka, and Andie MacDowell’s hair bounced and glistened with shine in the sun, people turning and staring in her wake—Laurie Circa 1994 smiled to all, so cute in her ruffled shirt but so humble about it, her smile spread across her face, showing as many of Julia Roberts’s teeth as would fit into her head, which was roughly about half.

And with that, I made mistake #3:

I pulled the shirt off the rack and asked if I could try it on. To be honest, I was already in over my head. The boutique was very nice, and I had admired its windows for months but had never caught it on an open day. When my luck had changed, I took the two steps into the store and did a quick sweep with all five senses, noticing a) mannequins so tiny I swear a bony sternum was impressed into them; b) the piping in of music overhead I couldn’t possibly identify; and c) the presence of the lovely, exquisite creature positioned behind the front counter, who politely said hello with a French accent. I already knew by the international greeting Bonjour! that I was in the wrong space—I was the wrong size and wrong age and had the wrong wallet—but it was too late for me to turn around and swim back upriver to Elastic Land. Instead, I pressed on with the attitude that “I’m smaller than I look in real life,” and I scanned the first rack with interest. I found myself picking at a hangnail because of my quick discomfort, which is a nervous habit that I understand isn’t publicly acceptable, but if faced with a choice of thumb-sucking or fiddling with my crotch, I’ll eat my cuticles any day. It was there that not only did I discover that the clothes were just as beautiful as I had seen in the window but that my size, indeed, was on the tags and, most important, on the tag of the cute shirt.

“Of course I’ll show you to a dressing room,” Amelie said as she walked out from the behind the counter and gave me a warm, real smile. Not only did all of Julia Roberts’s teeth fit into her mouth, but they were whiter.

It was a cute dressing room—full-length mirror, a nice antique chair to put my purse on, and beautiful lighting. I like that, I thought as I looked into the mirror, noting that during my most recent visit to Anthropologie, the lights were so audacious I wanted to ask the dressing-room girl if she could turn the setting down from its current “Cruel” to the next level, “Barbaric.” Now, I know I spent over half of my life puffing on a cigarette filter, but the Kitten Ass around my lips in my reflection at Anthropologie was so pronounced it looked like I had been injected with plasticine as I was sucking on a crack pipe. If you’ve never smoked, used a straw, or are still able to wear red lipstick without it spreading out like tributaries from your lips, you might not know that Kitten Ass is the nice term for the vertical fault lines that surround your mouth, and if you’ve never had a kitten, I suppose Puppy Ass would do. I refuse to take this conversation any further if you’ve never been a dog person, either, since I do not know what a ferret’s ass looks like.

In the Anthropologie mirror, I saw wrinkles, dents, flaps, bumps, and something that caused me to say to myself, “I hope that’s a tumor and not a horn.” I was nothing short of horrified. As I sunk to the depths of despair and looked up the address of the closest cosmetic surgeon before I even left the dressing room, I tried in a panic to calm down.

“Every wrinkle you see is a wisdom line,” I told myself in a nice, steady voice. “Wear them proudly; each one is a challenge and an obstacle you have triumphed over.”

“You have an asshole on your face,” one of my meaner voices replied. “Doesn’t everyone want a juicy Wisdom Kiss from that mouth?”

“You’re just growing into your face,” the nice voice said. “There is grace in aging.”

“Especially if you ever wanted to use your face as a baseball glove,” the mean voice countered. “It gets softer and more doughlike.”

“You know, these lights are ridiculously bright and are shining on you from directly up above,” the nice voice tried again....