A Free Credit Report

A memo circulated around the office yesterday, announcing that today, we would have to adhere to a business casual dress code. The Ukrainian tech guys here at Badvertiser were especially perturbed as this meant they had to wear something other than strangely dyed jeans and strappy leather sandals.

I thought this was a permanent new rule, but it turns out it was just to give the illusion that the staff is always impeccably dressed; we are putting on a show today for some big-name, fat-wallet investors who are coming in for a lunch meeting.

I, the veritable housewife of the Badvertiser office, am ordered to order lunch for the investors. Wraps and beverages from an unfamiliar eatery for a sextet of unfamiliar palates… the pressure is on. This food, I think, could enrich the goings-on in that hushed conference room; I can play a part, albeit a menial role, in the executive inner-workings of this company. Either that, or I ruin everything and make myself look incompetent.

I make sure the food gets here fifteen minutes early so that I have time to set up the arrangement. It’s an unmanageable smorgasbord though, as I don’t recall what I had ordered. Seeing as the wraps are wrapped up, not only in a layer of opaque foil, but an opaque whole wheat tortilla as well, I have no hint other than numbers written on the packaging. The numbers are a sort of code, but I am without a key. Yes, I see that there are two wraps labeled with the number three, and three wraps labeled with the number one, and one wrap labeled with the number five… but what does it all mean???

As I’m trying to crack this code, the investors arrive. Thirteen minutes early. None of the execs in the office are in the immediate vicinity, so here I am trying to make small talk with strangers from a strange company, while artfully sawing open the impenetrable wrappings of these wraps with a uselessly serrated butter knife. It is no easy feat. I'm starting to sweat.

Istanbul and Neo, my two bosses, peer into the conference room window, and I see a look of alarm pass over their face. I was supposed to have this lunch ready by the time the investors got here. But they enter the room, and the look of alarm quickly passes as they realize that I somehow have these investors swiveling and reclining back in the conference room chairs laughing, cheers-ing their bottles of water with my bottle of water, teaching each other secret handshakes we’d learned in the good ol’ days… maybe it’s the years and years of experience I’d gained bullshitting with customers at Café Gypsy, but I am a hit. Istanbul and Neo seem wary but satisfied, and I go back to my cubicle, feeling that perhaps I’m not a total waste of space in this company after all.

After the meeting, the investors come find me and bestow upon me generous blessing of gratitude. Lenny Bambino, my nemesis, glares at me from his stupid corner cubicle. I’m feeling pretty damn good about myself.

As if it couldn’t get better, Neo informs me that these investors said that somehow I had been the one to refer them to Badvertiser. “They must have me mistaken for someone else,” I tell Neo, insisting I haven’t ever referred anyone to use this company. (Really, Neo, I haven’t been referring people to use Badvertiser. Haven’t you been reading this blog?) But he insists right back at me that I am, in fact, the one responsible for bringing these investors into our office. I can’t convince him otherwise.

So now, I’m celebrating to myself this little fluke of a victory, eating a victory wrap leftover from the meeting. For what else is there to do but bask in free credit where credit is not due?

Destiny

The problem with having artist friends and acquaintances is their disregard of propriety.

The problem with me is that I, too, have little to no propriety. Chances are if you ask me to get naked for the sake of art, I will.

It all started with a little blog called the Daily T. Lo, which my screenwriter friend T. Lo and I created from the futon of her L.A. apartment a few years back. I had just quit Café Gypsy for the first time and had moved in with her for a little sabbatical from my life.

The Daily T. Lo was a fake blog, now defunct, about our lives together in which I co-starred as her perpetually, annoyingly, and embarrassingly topless roommate. There are lots of pictures on this blog of me eating scalding hot spaghetti and holding awkward yoga poses with a black censor bar over my tits. (I wasn’t ever really naked.)

Then, earlier this year, as I was on the verge of quitting Café Gypsy again, my scarfmaker friend Isobel asked me to model her work for a sort of “look book”—but, she mentioned, I would have to be topless. Topless, I thought, meant scarves would be covering anything that ought to be covered. But the day before the shoot, I found out I would be wearing only a thong.

Technically though, I hadn’t bared all, because I ended up covered in voodoo-like body paint, head to toe. Perhaps in an act of filial provocation, I showed off the pictures to my mother, who was none too happy—not simply because I was wearing only a thong, but because the photos were freaky rather than pretty. My mom prefers when I do “normal,” pretty things.

Well, last Friday night I went over to the apartment of this older artist couple I met through Café Gypsy, to meet with the guy, an old Irish photographer named Alen Macweeney. He had asked me if he could do a portrait of me, and after checking out his work, I said sure. We exchanged a couple of emails, and he suggested I wear whatever I wanted for the shoot—or nothing at all. I laughed, thinking to myself, “What do I look like, a nude model?”

But destiny called. Halfway through the shoot with Alen, I ended up topless. No censor bar, no paint, no nothing. Just destiny.

I don’t even know why I am writing this blog, documenting my quest to find the perfect job and to quit the imperfect ones. It’s all been bared to me now.

I am to become a nude model.