When I first moved to Los Angeles at age 27, I lived across the hall from a makeup artist. We had matching apartments on the second floor of a sunny four-plex, but that’s where our similarities ended. I worked from home, wore sweatpants everywhere, had zero friends, and sat on the couch all day complaining to my boyfriend, who also had zero friends. In contrast, the makeup artist across the hall wore hip clothes, had the best skin I’d ever seen, and did cool stuff around the clock, coming and going with her lighthearted buddies and walking around town with one hot stylish dude after another.
One afternoon, I encountered her chatting on the front steps with a friend, and I asked why I hadn’t seen her hot boyfriend around lately. “What happened, did he dump you?” This made her burst out laughing. “That guy was a loser,” she said. I nodded solemnly. Didn’t she realize I was a loser, too?
A few days later, she asked me to hang out with some of her friends at a cafe nearby. When I showed up, everyone seemed cheerful and well-adjusted, and everyone looked like Chloë Sevigny. No one seemed anxious or depressed. No one insulted themselves out of the blue for no reason.
This made me nervous. I had just moved from foggy San Francisco and I definitely belonged in chilly Brooklyn, but I was taking what I thought would be a brief detour in Los Angeles because my boyfriend was a Second Assistant Director and he thought that “film” mattered. (Film! I mean, my God!) That summer, we had seen “Saving Private Ryan” and afterward, we stood outside the Vista Theater smoking Du Maurier cigarettes like serious tools and he said, “I have some problems with that film.” And I said: “Stop right there. It’s not a film, it’s a movie. There are three blonde children touring a graveyard at the end. Tom Hanks cries in one scene. It’s a sentimental spectacle, not some hallowed work of art.”
Man, it was so great to be horrible, back when I was young and pretty! In fact, I want to urge every young and youngish woman out there to take advantage of their hotness for as long as possible, because it’s fun and it’s good for you and everyone should literally be punished by how amazing you look. You need to grind their faces into the shag carpet of what an unbearable smoke show you are.
…and a lot more.
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