She's Perfect With Just a Little Airbrushing

I was gorgeous before I moved to LA. If there is any town that will mess with your self image, it’s this one. Where women are rewarded with million dollar modeling contracts for not eating and living on cocaine, how is a real woman supposed to compete?

I did a little modeling for local catalogs when I was a pre-teen. I’d been scouted at thirteen by Elite but my dad was busy running a company and couldn’t drive me to jobs. He said I could sign with them when I was sixteen and could drive myself but by sixteen I was thinking about college and modeling just never seemed to fit in. In a family that praised brain power, using my looks to get ahead seemed like a mark of failure.

Seventeen years later, I figured what the heck? As long as I’m picking up long forgotten dreams, might as well see about that one too. I had a friend shoot some head/body shots of me and made the rounds of the agencies in town.

Most unceremoniously dismissed me. One said I had a great look but to try their Classics division. Classics means old people. At thirty-one I was supposed to schill for Depends? Another hawkish women said she liked my features but I was a little, you know, big. I plastered on a smile, thanked her and walked away.

Big? Old? Did this woman not care that I had worked my ass off over the last few years to lose my New York Frustration weight? I had gone from a size 14/16 to an 8. From 185 pounds to 150. “I never date a woman over 120pounds” says a profile on a local dating website, seeking tall women. 120 pounds? I’m six feet tall. Do you have any idea how emaciated I would look 30 pounds less? Well, if I could gain back up to fit a size 12 I could be a plus size model, was my consolation from hawkface. A 12? Plus size? A 12 is normal!

Discussing this with a former actress friend, she told me of her size-related dismissal. Once on set as a gigantic size 4, her zipper broke and when she went to wardrobe to get another dress she was told they only had size 0 and 2 in stock. She was just too big.

The thing is, I’m a grown up. I know better than to get caught up in body issues and pining for a size I’ll never achieve.

“Look how skinny she is.” I recently pointed out an A list actress to a friend.
“She doesn’t eat, sweetie.” She informed me. “They bring her juice in her trailer. Juice.”

A few months ago, Dove launched their Campaign for Real Beauty featuring normal shaped women on billboards all over town. I found myself staring at them every time I passed one. They tangled me up. My first thought was: Hooray for the big women! How great to give girls a better role-model than a juice-drinker. I loved the billboards.

I loved them as long as I had believed I was better than that. Great for them - patronizing pat on the head - but I’m skinny. I’m like that girl over there on the Calvin Klein billboard. That perfect, tiny-waisted, flat-tummied, perky-breasted, skinny-thighed…wait a minute.

As I checked out the stats of the Dove women online, I realized that was what that agency exec had seen when she’d looked at me, a big girl. A Dove girl, not a CK girl. A devastatingly normal girl. Then I hated the Dove billboards.

“Well, you are a big girl.” My dad’s voice echoes in my head. “A tall drink of water.”

“Um, yeah, well you eat,” says my friend Sarah.

So I should stop eating then. Clearly this is the solution. So me, a rational adult, a woman with no real visions of a super-model career, stopped eating. I fasted for a month. I drank juice. I worked out. I got down to a size six. A perfect, dress-fit model six. I felt gorgeous again. I went to the most expensive jean store in town and tried on jeans. I was sure the sales girl was insanely jealous over my perfect six ass. She was also probably not too thrilled I didn’t buy any jeans. I knew I couldn’t maintain it. Sarah was right. I eat. I like food. I learned to cook in Italy for chrissakes. And those people know good food!

So I spent many more months straightening my metabolism back out so I could eat normal, balanced food and not inflate like a balloon. I’m back to the size and weight I should be at six feet. I’m still trying to rebuild the muscle tone I lost.

It’s a challenge to love the skin you’re in when the world around you exalts the impossibly skinny and the boy you like stops calling you and dates a model instead.

And I was a grown up when I embarked on this folly. So what about the girls behind me? What about the women who know better who still beat themselves up for not looking like a juice drinker? How are teen girls with visions of Cindy Crawford stardom in their eyes supposed to keep their wits about them and their lunches in their stomachs? People slag Kate Moss for doing coke. Well of course she does. We demand that she maintain that impossibly skinny look and how else is it humanly possible? If she gained an ounce the press would rail on about fat and pudgy Kate Moss when she might be edging toward normal at that point.

Did I come to town thinking I’d be the next top model? Well, maybe not. But nor did I expect to be dismissed from every agency in town. Did I expect to be told I was pretty? Yes.


It’s taken me a year of going down down down and then back up to be able to look in the mirror and feel like I felt back home. And if the only person in town who tells me I’m pretty is me, it’s taken me that long to be fine with that - to be fine with normal. It’s important to realize that in a town this crazy image-obsessed, you should only listen to the people whose opinions really count. Like that girl in the mirror. And your cool friend, Sarah, who will share a cookie with you because, really, life’s too short.

Shooting the Nightingale

The effects of traumatic events are fascinating. They often produce radical behavior changes in us goofy humans. More pressure creates exponentially more interesting reactions. Squeezing a balloon until it pops is much more entertaining that just watching it roll around. Right?

So, a little like playing a not-so-benevolent god, I drop my characters into pressured worlds and then squeeze. And squeeze some more. But in the end, they are rewarded for their survival because I am benevolent after all. I write comedies. The funny thing about studying character behavior and by extension human behavior is that you start to see your whole life like a reworkable stimulus/response plot point. The problem is life isn’t so neatly reworked.

Anyone who has read Hemingway or seen old war romances knows that the injured soldier always falls for his lovely nurse. His dire circumstances have made him reexamine his life and possibly alter his value system and now he sees the healing power of love. And she, the Plain-Jane that he never noticed before, becomes his one true love. Isn’t that great?

Well, what about the other girl? The one who loved him already but didn’t get the nurse’s assignment or who was waiting for her brave soldier to come home? She is outside the scope of said traumatic event that caused the soldier’s value shift so she is inevitably left in the b-story. But how does the soldier know he wouldn’t have been better off with the girl at home rather than the nurse whom he decided he needed merely because she was there to help him heal?

Recently a friend of mine…OK a boy I liked…had just such a trauma. We had developed a cautiously flirty friendship and though he had met someone just before meeting me, he confessed to me the many ways he thought I would make a more appropriate mate than she would. Naturally, I agreed. She was clearly a b-story girl as far as I was concerned. So he and I made plans to get together. We needed to road test the compatibility of this attraction.

But instead, his trauma came along. And despite my best efforts, b-girl beat me to the nurse’s cap. At first he was jovial in rebuffing my offers to mop his traumatized brow. But as the healing progressed so did the Florence Nightingale spell b-girl cast. Finally, he stopped returning my emails all together.

Next I got a call from a mutual friend.

“I have bad news,” she murmured.

I think, oh God, the trauma was too much and he died.

“He’s engaged.”

Same thing really. Yes, in the realm of the single girl in the LA dating pond, death and engagement share equal footing. Apparently, I’m dead to him. Otherwise this friendship of ours wouldn’t have vaporized like a dew puddle in the desert. I know, I know. I am not holding up my end of communications like a real friend either. But what can you do when your friend doesn’t call you back? And besides, I am jealous. I hate being the b-story.

In the movies, it’s clear who the right girl is for the great guy. We cheer when the gold digger or the shallow girl falls away, utterly unable to compete with the superior power of the true love girl. But what about when things aren’t so easily discernable? What about when characters come together because of trauma? Is it love or just Florence Nightingale syndrome? What if I was Kristin Scott Thomas to his Ralph Fiennes? Sure, he could be fond of Juliette Binoche as she nursed him but he’d know who his real love was. Of course, we’d both be dead in the end but that’s beside the point.

All work and trauma pressures aside, we got along well. We made each other laugh. Could something serious have developed? Sure, I think there was a good chance. But the bottom line is they’ve gone they way they’ve gone. Back to the pond with me. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to figure out how to make life go the way I write it.

A Guardian Butterfly

Part of moving to a big city like L.A. is having a more diverse community, meeting people you just wouldn’t have access to at home. People besides Brad Pitt. I have lived in a lot of places and have met all kinds of people. Even living in New York and being engaged to a Jewish man did not prepare me for Aidel.

During my first month here, I spent one of my pre-employment days of leisure at the DMV switching my license and my plates to the California variety. I was thumbing through a friend’s script in the waiting area when a soft voice at my side asked “what’s that?” Surprised to meet someone in this town who didn’t recognize a script at fifty paces, I spent the next two hours discussing life with this tiny, orthodox Jewish Israeli woman with the impish glint in her eyes.

Only a few years older than me, she told me about her four children and her American husband. She told me about the crazy way her parents had met in London high society and fled to Israel during the war. She told me about some cousin or other that was supposedly a big deal producer in town.

For some reason I felt completely at home with her. I told her about everything. She seemed genuinely delighted to get inside my life and not in the “what can you do for me?” way of LA. But in the way a child listens to you read a story because you are giving her access to a new world.

After that day at the DMV, we’d meet every month or so and sit and talk. It was always at her house.

“I need time with my friend,” she’d shoo her kids out of the room.

It was early in these meetings that I began to realize Aidel was different from me in ways other than her Jewishness. I’d tell her I’d spoken with my mom about my latest script idea and she’d tell me that my mother was about to go through a big change and that she’d make a move that would surprise us. Later that year my mom went through a divorce, radiation, and then moved to New York City, a place she’d professed too big a fear of to visit when I’d lived there just a few years earlier.

I hate to use the word ‘psychic,’ especially in conjunction with the word ‘friend’ as that conjures up visions of Dionne Warwick. Later, when I finally met her sister, she referred to it as Aidel’s gift. Whatever it was, it was at times unsettling and always accurate.

Usually the first thing she’d ask me about was my love life. I had told her about my Jewish ex, the Agent Man, and my time in New York.

“I was his shickza” I laughed.

Her face clouded. “Don’t use that word. It’s not kind.”

For as much as I’d learned about Judaism, I knew so little about Jewishness.

I remember later reporting excitedly to her about a man I was dating. He was European - always a source of points with me - and from a very rigidly ethical background.

She sighed and without ceremony said “No, he’s not the one for you.”

I sputtered and protested that yes, I thought he was. She calmly waited until I was done and then proceeded to tell me why he wasn’t the right one.

“He doesn’t appreciate your humor or your sense of life.”

I got quiet and we talked about other things. I felt like a petulant teenager.

I stopped calling or coming by so often. I told myself it was because I felt like such an outsider in her world and I didn’t want to upset things by calling on a day I didn’t know was a Jewish holiday or come by not dressed conservatively enough. But really, I didn’t want her to be right anymore.

One day this boyfriend and I were driving and, as usual, I was singing along to every song and doing goofy car-dance moves. I thought it would make him laugh. My sister and I always cracked each other up this way. Instead, he reached over and slammed the radio off. I froze and heard Aidel’s voice in my head. He may as well have told me to stop being me. The relationship held on for a few more months but I think I knew it was over right then. I called Aidel and she told me she couldn’t see me, she was sick.

It was a while before she called me again. Finally, she was well enough and wanted to see me. I came over and told her she’d been right about the boyfriend. She smiled quietly. She was bony and rail thin and I worried my hug hurt her. She never spoke to me of cancer. For as much as she wanted to delve into my life, it seemed she felt there were parts of hers she needed to keep from me. She dodged my questions after her well-being and asked about my life. I said my sister had met a guy. Aidel told me she’d move somewhere hot. A week later, my sister called to tell me she was moving to Arizona for this guy.

I saw Aidel less after that. It depended if she was well enough. I would never have minded to see her in any health but I think it embarrassed her to be seen so frail when she’d been so vivacious. She never wanted to need help.

She called me one Monday. She needed to go to her doctor. It was a Jewish holiday: Shavuot. This meant no one but a non-Jew could drive her. When I pulled up to the door, I was greeted by looks of distrust by the neighbors. It had only been about a month since I’d last seen her but the Aidel that emerged from the building made my voice catch in my throat. Her husband did not smile at me as he helped her into my low sports car. I wondered if it was from his own distress watching his wife waste away or the same distrust of outsiders I’d read on the neighbors’ faces.

As we drove to her doctor’s clinic she explained that they’d disagreed about her even going to the doctor or riding in a car on the holiday but she felt her life was more important than the holiday. God would understand. I cursed my sport suspension which jounced her birdlike body over every bump.

“It’s fine,” she soothed, “with the morphine I don’t feel it.”

She would not let me carry her up the stairs to the clinic though she could not have weighed more than eighty-five pounds. She insisted she could do it herself. I steadied her and she did a sideways shuffle up the wheelchair ramp since she couldn’t get her legs to lift forwards. I watched them inject her with an experimental stem cell potion. After, she seemed to walk more steadily, clinging to my arm as we made our way back to the car.

At this point in our friendship, I saw no point in sugar-coating anything. “Are you scared to die?”

“No.”

“Are your kids scared?”

“They are prepared.”

There was so much I wanted to understand about her life and her spirituality. So much I wanted to apologize for in my absences. How could I tell her how much I valued her when I’d never really shown it?

“Any new men?” she asked as her head lolled on my passenger seat.

“No.” Then I told her about letting go of my delusions with the Director.

“He’s British,” she smiled, “and tall, yes?”

“Yes, 6’4””

I held my breath. I hadn’t wanted to bring him up. I didn’t want to have her tell me what I already knew: move on.

“He is the one for you. It will be a good life together. Just give him space”

My vision blurred and I had to focus on gripping the steering wheel. A few months before, that news would have been welcome but now it was like a punch in the stomach. Dreaming of him had suffocated me. Was I supposed to open back up to that hope and hurt? I concentrated on the road.

We arrived at her door and I wanted to tell her I loved her. But I didn’t. She brought me inside and insisted on peeling me a grapefruit for helping her. I cried all the way back to work.

The next phone call I got was not from Aidel. A month later I turned my phone on as my flight from New York landed. I’d been visiting my mom in her improbable new life. A voice I didn’t know told me that Aidel had passed away and there was a memorial that night if I could make it.

Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed a large scarf out of my suitcase and wrapped it around my head and shoulders. I stood in the back of the Yeshiva and listened to the soothing sounds of the Hebrew prayers. I really had believed that she would get better and always be there to talk to as I grew my Hollywood life. I was in shock.

Later, a woman I’d met at the memorial called to tell me when the family was planning to sit Shiva. I panicked and called all my Jewish friends. What do I bring? What do I wear? How do I act at an orthodox Shiva? Even my least reformed Jewish friend didn’t know. I worried I’d offend the family by showing up as an outsider. Then I decided I had to go just out of love for Aidel.

The only death ritual I know is the Catholic wake where everyone needs to eat. I bring a bag of fresh fruit with me, the only thing I can be sure is kosher. I enter their modest house and find the men and women gathered in separate rooms. I sit with the women, awkwardly holding my fruit until someone takes it and puts it on a table.

We are silent for a while until Aidel’s sister sits on the couch facing me. She looks at me with the same wide grey eyes as Aidel; still and glinting at the same time. I introduce myself.

“Oh, you are Heidi.”

She explains to me that when they asked Aidel to make a list of who she wanted at her Shiva, mine was the first name she had said. Me. Why? What had I given her? Not half of what she had given me. I breathe through my mouth to keep from crying.

We sit for a while longer before another friend prompts Aidel’s oldest, a twelve year old daughter, to ask me about her mother. The girl takes up a pad and pen.

“I’m making a memory book,” she explains. She looks like she’s tired of people waiting for her tears.

I tell her about how I’d met her mother in the DMV and the unique friendship she’d brought to my life.

I talk about Aidel always lending me books she wanted me to read. Most had been about Jewish history. She’d been torn about lending me one because “the narrator had some anger at the Germans he escaped from.” She knew I had a German background.

“I think he had a right to be angry,” I’d told her.

Aidel had lent me the book, laughing about all the Germans in her life now and how she never would have imagined she would have Germans as friends; people who helped her family’s well-being rather than hurt it.

The women laugh as I come to a stop. How could I explain to this girl what her mother had given me? How Aidel’s gift terrified me, challenged me and thrilled me all at once? Her earnest grey eyes fix on me, pen poised.

“She was a butterfly,” I finally say. “She was a beautiful soul that flew into my life for little while.”

She nods and writes. How can I tell her I feel just as lost without her mother as she does?

Her sister watches me watching Aidel’s daughter write.

“Did you know her Hebrew name?”

I shake my head.

“Schlomit,” the sister tells me. “It means ‘Complete’.”

I start crying.

As the months have passed I have thought of Aidel on nearly a daily basis. I wonder how her family is managing without her. No doubt they’ve been embraced by their community and though they surely miss her, they are managing. Selfishly, I wonder how Aidel could have left me with so many questions unanswered. The most burning of them: how could she have been wrong about the Director? I tell myself the morphine must have scrambled her reception.

Sometimes I talk to her. I ask her if she sees things I see. I tell her I miss her. I ask her what I should do about whatever is going on today. Last night, I watched a fluffy love story where the lovers loved passionately but had to go through trials of fire to finally be together. It was silly overall but I was inspired by the main idea of a love like that…that does not alter when it alteration finds.

Later, I turned off my bedside lamp and asked Aidel if she was there. I asked her what fires I have to go through to find that love. In the next moment I heard a faint but clear whisper:

“You are burning now.”

There's Anyplace Like Home

I was sitting on my quaint front porch swing of my quaint cottage looking at the big mountains when my dad called. He was glad my life had settled into a happy ease. “But what are you going to do?” He wanted to know. “What do you want?”

I sat on my quaint front porch swing some more and thought. I loved my mountains and never wanted to leave. But I also wanted, I discovered, to create something that inspired me. I wanted to write again. I wanted to make movies that inspired people. My quaint little mountain town was not the place to be. I wrenched myself out of my own nest and set out.

After two years in Hollywood, I went back to the mountains recently. I wanted to spend my birthday at home and visit my old haunts. I wasn’t exactly expecting a fanfare when I walked into the Irish pub where I used to work, but a small cheer would have been nice. Confetti maybe? After two years, most of my friends have moved on. A handful were still there and willing to raise a pint with me. I regaled them with tales of celeb sightings and gave a detailed description of the golf cart I get to drive at my cool Studio job. No writing success yet though.

Even the most provincial of the barflies asked if I am honestly surprised that I haven’t sold a script yet. The others collectively raised an eye brow over their pints of porter. Yes, I really did think there was gold in them thar pages. I figured the same innate ease of wordsmithing that had allowed me to skate through school, prose assignments and heartfelt thank you notes would serve me here in Hollywood as well.

What I’ve learned is this script stuff is – newsflash - actually really hard. Sure a lot of crap gets made and that’s a whole ‘nother story. To all the Mabels and Jethros who stand up in their armchairs, indignantly brandishing their Blockbuster rental over their heads and crying “I could write this stuff!” I am here to say no, you can’t. Well alright maybe, but you have to come here and tear your heart out on a daily basis first, let someone stomp all over it, thank them for their feedback, rewrite everything you just did and then offer your heart again. Rinse, wrench, repeat. Come to think of it, it’s not too different from dating.

Anything worth reading (or seeing on the big screen) has someone’s whole heart in it. At first this scared the crap out of me. But then I figured what else am I going to do with this life? Isn’t this more interesting than the corporate advertising and marketing that was my bread and butter? To me, yes. Sure, feeding myself and paying rent is also interesting. But having conquered my ten-year fear of Hollywood from way back in my senior year of college, I’m out to create a fully-lived life.

That weekend back home, my brother, the Undaunted Graphic Designer, took me to a sandwich shop for lunch. As we munched our pastramis at a sidewalk table I became increasingly restless. The sky at home was a blue impossible for LA. And the quiet… I finally told him “You know what’s different? If this were LA, this street would be clogged with cars, there’d be a valet stand there, and we’d have seen at least three Ferraris by now.” We laughed but there was something nagging at me in that small truth. I realized I couldn’t take the quiet, solid reality of home anymore. I had fallen head-over-trendy-metallic-heels in love with LA. I couldn’t wait to get back to my superficial, consumerist, overcrowded, overpriced home. There’s something gratifying in the make-believe of it all but I think what I really love is the predicable unpredictability of it all. Sure, there are the Hollywood players that are always gonna get their deals together. But you really don’t know who the next fresh energy is going to be. Besides, my brother up and moved to Seattle last week. He was the last vestige of family at home. If home is where the heart is, then I have fragmented rooms all over the world.

I had a professor who said that every possible story has already been told. The only thing that makes yours different and with any luck, interesting, is that you are the one telling it. So I’m here, telling it and yes, I really do think that one day, trite as it may sound, I’ll see my name after the “written by” on the big screen. And yes, next year when I go home to visit, if my friends ask “did you still really think you’d have sold something by now?” I’ll still say yes if I honestly can. If I can’t I’ll donate my shiny LA shoes, re-tie my hiking boots and ask the barman for my own pint of porter.