Small Victories

After kicking around New York for ten years with no discernible change in the reality already established-- I was married-- to an equally struggling actor- and we’d get work from time to time, but money was that thing that everyone else seemed to have.  Well, not anyone we really knew, but people we knew of had money.  And jobs.  They had both. We had neither.

We didn’t get work more than we did get work, so there was always the need for something extra to be earned on the side. And we were by no means children. We were thirty. But we were actors, so we acted like we were children.

One day, with no discernible prospects in sight, a call came that was slightly unusual. Bernie, a big and getting bigger casting director was looking for me. Looking for me. And this was a casting director who was inescapably sweet, even if he never hired me. He always cheerfully never cast me. I quickly wondered if I had left a sweater behind after yet another humiliating audition where Cynthia Nixon got the part.  Breathing hard, I called his office and he got on the phone with me right away and was very happy I called because he had an interesting project and thought I was perfect for it. Could I come over right away? I could. All things happening up to this point were most unusual. For me.

I got dressed, trying not to be overly excited, but couldn’t help but rapidly wonder if my life was about to change. Whenever I’d imagined my life suddenly changing, which I liked to do when it seemed destined to glide off course like an unmanned space drone- it would be like this. An ordinary day, which began with me at odds and ends, yet somehow concluded with the rest of my life being set on a wonderful, irrevocable track. The day that would be highlighted in the Vanity Fair article on me with a sentence like- “Then, one day, everything changed.”

I That Girl-walked to Bernie’s office—where every stranger and every leashed dog seemed to take a second look because my slightly irrepressible sparkle was glinting off their buttons and tags—where there was a soundtrack to my cross town jaunt and I supplied my own voiceover—“ Sometimes Mondays take you somewhere other than to another Monday night… she thought as she crossed the garmento racks being pushed by halfway house rejects.”  I went from my soundtrack to the director shooting the making of  the movie of me- because everyone’s favorite scene is where the heroine’s drab hardscrabble life changes in a miraculous heartwarming scene that makes your eyeball swell.

I bounded up the casting director’s office stairs and the casting director ran out of his office and nodded his red jewfro vigorously. “Oh, yeah. You really look like her.” All the girls in his office leaned over cube walls and peered and murmured tacit approval. As eager Polaroids were taken of my face, the big casting guy told me what it was about.  Annie Liebowitz was doing a spread on seminal female artists for Vanity Fair. One of the artists was Cindy Sherman.

I perked up instantly. Cindy Sherman? I love Cindy Sherman. I went to art school, Rhode Island School of Design, and all the art girls worshipped at the altar of Cindy Sherman and her iconic self referential photographs. It was almost an art school contest, who would not only know of Cindy Sherman’s work, but who would get her first.  Who would study her crudely made up and even garish self portraits and get them on a deep feminist level before anyone else did.  I was familiar with all her transformational photos and I loved her film noir shots- where she made herself up as B movie queens and took ‘set stills’ of never made films—She was meta almost before anyone else-  And if there needed to be more proof of my fandom, I knew that Cindy Sherman and I both grew up on Long Island- and I knew that I bore more than a passing resemblance to her.  And this was before the age of Google. So to work with Cindy Sherman, on an Annie Liebowitz portrait was almost too much to consider happening to me.   it was almost like destiny or something. I blurted all this out in an excited, pre-Paxil rush.

 Bernie was happy I felt this way, but it really didn’t matter, that I was somehow more qualified than anyone else to like Cindy Sherman. “Yeah, that’s great. But you really look like her.”

I agreed in another convivial, confessional rush. I’d always felt that I looked like her, but no one else seemed to notice or care, mostly because Cindy Sherman didn’t ever really look like Cindy Sherman, she was always changing herself. She was brilliant and an inspiration to art students everywhere. She had no money, but a desire to make art, so she used herself as the canvas. Really fucking smart. So, now I was finally getting the recognition that I looked like a successful artist that I liked. I was so excited. Bernie went on to explain that Annie’s concept for the portrait was to surround an unmasked Cindy Sherman with Cindy Sherman look a likes, so even in her portrait, the viewer wouldn’t be sure who was the real Cindy Sherman. The money was okay, a hundred and fifty bucks for one day, but a free meal, a costume fitting, and a day in Annie Liebowitz’ studio. Oh, and a copy of the picture. An Annie Liebowitz print. That’d be nice to have, right? He marveled over my resemblance to Cindy Sherman one last time, and then I left. He had work to get back to and I didn’t so, it was time to go.

I floated home. I was going to get this job. I finally had a gig in the bag. No one was going to look more like Cindy Sherman than me. And even better, I didn’t have to do anything to look the most like her. I didn’t have to do an accent, or look good in a skirt, or make my eyes look wider, or my hair look thicker or myself look younger. I was the best person for the job simply by being me. This was why I was available, this was why nothing else had come up. This was so The Artist’s Way! I’d kept the channel open and here was something unique, unusual and so specific to me! And I’d be making one hundred fifty bucks for just being me. And I’d be making one hundred and fifty bucks with Cindy Sherman, who I idolized, and I wouldn’t have to do anything. Just be me.  No one was going to be more clever, or have made a better choice, or wear better clothes, or say just the right thing to get the job. It was the one time in my life where my limited talents weren’t going to do me in again.  I wasn’t going to be done in by someone better. This job, of looking like an influential important 1980s female artist, was all mine.

My husband was reasonably excited. Then the phone calls started. I got the job, congratulations. Hi, this is wardrobe, what are your sizes? I lied as best I could, but any experienced wardrobe person knows that when a woman says she’s a four, she’s a six. The wardrobe woman even complimented me on how much I looked like Cindy Sherman. I basked in the glow of the compliment. Finally I was going to be recognized for my ability to look like someone special. The wardrobe woman went on to add that even my dimensions were the closest to Cindy’s. And that’s when it hit me. There would be other Cindy Sherman look alikes. But I slept deeply that night, knowing I’d be the best.

I fairly skipped to the costume fitting, which was only traumatic in two ways. One that the wardrobe woman didn’t know the game as I knew it and I couldn’t fit into the clothes she didn’t know I wouldn’t fit into. It was a simple black pair of pants and a simple white shirt, black shoes and white socks. Nothing special, just from The Gap, but we’d all be in it. Even Cindy Sherman. But then it got weird and a little less special as one friend of mine walked into the fitting. Then another, then another, then another.

There was Cathy, who was equally surprised to see me. There was Robin, who looked at me, smiled and said, wow, you really look like her. Then a few acquaintances came in and we all stood around, fitting or not fitting into our costumes and checking each other out to see who looked the most like Cindy Sherman. I won, but went home feeling less special.  The kicker was when a very young girl showed up, making us all feel old. She sort of, perhaps kind of looked like Cindy Sherman, maybe when Cindy was a pre-teen, and served more of the purpose to make the rest of us feel old, if content in the knowledge that Cindy was old too.

As I walked home from the fitting, determined to lose enough weight to fit into the costume at the size I pretended to be, by the following morning, I was nagged by a feeling.

Was it that I had picked friends, close friends, who looked an awful lot like me, which would make me an ego mad narcissist, or even odder, if I had chosen friends who looked like Cindy Sherman. It was also odd that it bothered me, but I couldn’t get over the sneaking suspicion that somehow all this physical similarity between me and women I genuinely know and like and women I don’t know but admire, just betrays a severe lack of imagination and/or self esteem on my part. Everyone was an actress, which made sense, since the shoot was cast by a casting director. We all eyed each other, figuring out the Cindy Sherman pecking order rather fast. For the first time ever, I was the undisputed shoo in.

I slept alright, still content that I would be the best Cindy Sherman look a like, but spooked out by all the intersecting overlapping people that would be a part of my Annie Liebowitz-Cindy Sherman look a like moment.

I got to the studio significantly early, because I show up early when I can’t wait to be places. Annie shook my hand, and commented on my extreme likeness to Cindy, which made me all warm and runny inside. It also lit an Olympian-like fire in my heart- to be the best Cindy Sherman Annie would meet all day, yet also be so much myself that Annie would be irrevocably drawn to me, and perhaps even take a headshot of me, gratis. But Annie quickly moved on to something else. I understood. She was busy.

Annie’s studio was impressively massive. It seemed to take up a whole well lit floor of a Soho building, with wraparound windows that framed the Hudson River. The sunlight was expensive. The studio seemed all white- walls, floors, backdrops, rooms, offices and staff. Annie’s camera was big and dramatic and dominated the room like a crucifix. Annie’s assistants, all young men, would run and hop for her, reverentially tending to its needs, like young serious altar boys.

The other actresses showed up. There were twelve of us, but one of Annie’s altar boys let us know that some of us would be cut as the day wore on. They would only end up with six or five of us on the shoot, but Annie and her famous camera eye would determine who would stay and who would go. It got a little more Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan at that point, but I was Oksana Baiul.  

 Even Robin, another one of my friends who looks like me and looks like Cindy blurted it out as we all got dressed. “Well, we all know who’ll be the last Cindy standing.” It was me. I could be demure in this knowledge, because, after all, it wasn’t like I had done something to deserve this. I’d merely been born to look more like someone who had accomplished something rare and wonderful, than anyone else could resemble. But this and this alone, would be the one thing that no one, not even Cindy Sherman’s sister, unless she was an identical twin, could take away from me.

Cindy finally showed up.  Annie was much more excited to meet Cindy, and started her VIP treatment with a very experienced professional polish. I can appreciate that it behooved Annie to make her star subject very relaxed, pampered and comfortable, for the sake of a smooth and productive shoot, but she seemed like a big ass kisser nonetheless. Cindy Sherman seemed very shy, uncomfortable with the attention and the poshness of it all and not at all like a very wealthy in demand edgy art star.  We all got dressed together.  The make up and hair stylists did little things, trimming our hair to Cindy’s length, parting it like hers, and making us up to look as much like her without make up as possible. The make up artist exclaimed that he didn’t have to do much to me, and I blushed, inwardly drunk on the Cindy Sherman love and attention coming my way. I wondered if this is how royal people feel. Nothing makes you royalty, you just are born into it, but everyone treats you like you’ve been crowned by God himself.

I wondered all day how to play the Cindy Sherman card. I had to say something to her, but I didn’t want to press, to push it, to seem too needy. While we were putting on our matching socks and shoes I murmured coolly to her, “This must be weird for you.” She chuckled a little and nodded. I scored.  How could I let drop that I knew she was from Long Island and how much I get that, as I grew up there too, without sounding like a stalker? I was fervently thinking all these things and more when we were called to the set. So, this must be how men feel when they are looking for a way in with a dame.

We stood to the side, like a gym class, while Annie picked the first line up of Cindys to flank Cindy. I acted like I didn’t know I’d be first, didn’t want to make the other Cindys hate me. I could embrace modesty now, and it felt good to cheer for the other girls, knowing they didn’t stand a chance.  I was picked first, and everyone oohed as I stood beside Cindy. We were twins.

Annie filled in the rest of the line carefully. Then she started snapping, giving us directions. Cindy was to be the only one who didn’t look into camera. We stood there, holding ourselves like her. We could see ourselves in a mirror behind Annie, to mimic Cindy Sherman as much as possible. Annie cut some girls. We all waved warmly good bye.

Annie repeatedly told me to put my chin down. I don’t know why it kept floating up, especially when I could see that Cindy’s chin was down. But my chin kept easing skyward- something in me was forcing me to come out of my Cindy, to be different.

Cathy, my other friend who looks like me and Cindy, laughed out loud on a quick break. She was standing next to the young girl, who turned to her and said “I’m Claire. I’m twelve.” Only afterwards did I realize that she was Claire Danes. She got cut early, didn’t look enough like Cindy. In this event, and this event only, I was kicking Claire Danes’ twelve year old ass. Bye, Claire.

We had a lovely, gourmet lunch break. Beautiful bread, lentil salad, veggies and cold meats. We sat around, on chairs, under huge portraits of Misha, Susan Sontag and Bette Midler. We ate food we couldn’t afford, dressed like the art darling, looked down on from high by captured stars and their bounced celebrity light. It was inspiring and deflating all at once.

After lunch, Annie had settled on the final six. Some girls were switched around, but I stayed by Cindy’s side. Annie asked Cindy if she was familiar with Annie’s big Polaroid camera; artist to artist talk. Cindy said no. That was the extent of that. Annie wasn’t gonna be kissing too much of this artist’s ass.

Annie shot a while longer. Near the end, she pointed at one girl, on the end, a skinny dark blonde who really had very little in the way of Cindy about her. Annie told her, “You must be a wonderful actress because here you don’t look like Cindy that much, but you’ve been morphing into her. You’ve become the most like Cindy, it’s been amazing to watch.” I burned inwardly the rest of the shoot. Mercifully it ended soon after. Here, in the one thing I knew I could do,t he one thing I was the best at, without even trying, I was outdone by talent.

I got my check, I got to keep the clothes, and I was promised a print when Annie would finish with developing. I never did get my print. It’s worth thousands of dollars by now, but Annie’s office just stopped returning my calls. I did see the photo- it’s good. And people have called me from all over the world. They’ve called from museums in Spain and France and England to say they saw me on a wall, next to some artist they’d never heard of. And they all marvel over how much I look like Cindy Sherman. Then they ask me who she is and what has she done?