When a plastic Ariel was all a girl needed.

I got my head shots taken this morning. It was slightly awesome. The guy that did them, Kim (yes, that’s really his name) was supa fun. The whole experience was sort of strange, but then again so is everything I do that involves acting, or me moving in the direction of feeling like “okay, this is what I’m doing…I’m an….actress? Really? Whaaaa?”

 I’ll be in acting class, about to get up to do my monologue in front of eighteen people, and I’m like, “WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING HERE???? I AM A FRAUD. EVERYONE KNOWS. AND DO I EVEN LIKE DOING THIS???”

I think I like it. I better. Those pics cost mad money. But they were good. 

Right when I got to the studio, Kim and I chatted, and after a few minutes he squinted at me, and said “you know, after speaking with you on the phone I had no idea what to expect. (Pause.) But you’re much cooler in person. You were a little intense on the phone.” Loud laughter between him and his assistant. Hmm…..He proceeded to call me “intense” about fourteen more times that day, and also kept raising up my arm in the air like a boxer. I think he’s my new best friend.

But actually getting the photos taken wasn’t that fun. I felt mad awkward, and Kim kept yelling “BAM!” at me whenever he clicked the camera, sort of like Emeril. But the hair and make-up lady was wicked cool, and they did bust out a wind machine at the end, just as a techno remix of that “new soul” song from the Mac commercials came on. I felt sort of like Tai in Clueless. 

I loved my hair and make-up lady friend. Her name was Carla. She had just gotten back from working fashion week with Kim in NYC. Carla has three children. She went to Pratt and studied to be a painter. She showed me photos of her children; I might baby-sit them soon. Anyhow, one of the photos Carla showed me was of her youngest child, her only son, Marco. In the pic Marco was sitting in front of a kick-ass birthday cake; the cake was covered in construction toys and had lots of blue frosting and crushed up Oreos to resemble dirt spread everywhere. Marco had a huge grin plastered on his face. And it’s strange how your memory is jogged by things, because looking at that cake, and hearing Carla describe how much Marco loved it, brought me back to a memory I haven’t thought about in forever, or maybe even ever. I started to think about a birthday cake I had when I five maybe, or seven; I don’t even really know how old I was. But it was a Little Mermaid b-day cake, and I picked it out all by myself at BJ’s in Faaahaven. I’m not sure it’s what my mom had in mind; I don’t think we even went there that day to get my birthday cake. But I wanted that thing SO BAD when I saw it. My heart would not go on without it. I remember the purple frosting so clearly, but what really got me about le cake was that on it, there was a plastic figurine of Ariel lounging like a tranny with Scuttle. I loved that figurine so much. After we ate all the cake, I used it as a bath toy. For years. I still use it. Just kidding.

Sort of.

But it’s just funny to me how easy it is to make children happy; how excited they get over such basic things, like frosting, and their own birthday cake, and playing in the bath with a piece of plastic that WAS on their birthday cake, and like having a memory like that and just remembering what it was like to be so small and how sitting in some industrial warehouse in South Boston with this woman whom I’ve never met before and who was just plucking my eyebrows and is now showing me photos of her beautiful children and suddenly I can smell the inside of the BJ’s and remember running my fingers over the VHS tapes in the entertainment section, the big foamy ones that used to hold the kids’ movies. I remember buying Free Willy in that BJ’s. I LOVED that movie.

Okay, enough rambling about the wholesale warehouse. To change course, I’d like to say that I just got back from the gym (meaning I walked at a snail pace on the treadmill for one mile while muttering under my breath about how much I hate Kobe Bryant), and I have recently discovered a Mary J. song that I listened to a lot in the early part of the summer and it’s fookin AMAZING. It’s a great song to do crunches and/or lip synch around your bedroom to. And all the haters can shut it. Mary’s optimism rocks my world and her little introduction to the tune is unreeeeal.

On a final note, at one in the morning today, my boyfriend texted me the following: “Taylor Swift is a hottie.”

Um? I had been under the impression he was at a party, but thought maybe that meant he was now home alone in his bed reading Rolling Stone or something. (Which is my average night.)  When I asked his hungover ass about the text today, he said “Yeah, I have no idea what that was.” He also said he fell asleep sitting upright on the couch with his shoes on. Classy guy.