Box Girl (18 page)

This air of inapproachability has long been considered attractive. In the mid-nineteenth century, Edouard Manet caused an uproar when his painting “Olympia” was presented at the 1865 Paris Salon. What was so scandalous about this painting was not that the woman was completely naked—nudes had been painted for years—but that she was making direct eye contact with the viewer. I suppose you could say she was “eye-contacting” the viewer. Such forwardness was considered lewd, vulgar, and immoral. She should have been more demure, lying there with no clothes on.

The Standard, too, wants the Box Girls to be elusive and thus alluring, but not seductive in a comely “eye-contacting” sort of way. We are supposed to seem inaccessible, just ever-so-slightly out of the ogler's reach. In addition to no “eye-contacting,” one Box Girl rule requires “light, natural makeup.” They want us to be intriguing, but not in the lingerie, platform heels, and thick eyeliner tradition; rather, in the vein of girl-next-door-just-reading-on-her-floor. Even the uniforms, though there isn't much to them—all white, cotton—imply some sort of purity. It's wholesomeness, with a wink.

I wonder what Steinem would think of the box, if she would see it as something that is degrading to women. (Why do we
all
have to be women?) As a humanist, as well as a feminist, she might say, “Put men in there, too! Make it a true peek into human nature.” I wonder what men would be required to wear.

I also wonder if Steinem would notice the obvious (though I don't think intentional) metaphor: a woman locked below a glass ceiling.

Interview

“They're looking for a new blonde,” was the way my friend
Clare put it to me. A new blonde Box Girl at The Standard, she explained. Clare and I had worked together at
Flaunt
, and before that, she was a Box Girl.

She said I had to go in for an interview.

“An interview?” I asked. “What are they going to ask me? How skilled I am at sitting?”

She told me to meet the hotel's art director in the lobby at one o'clock.

While I waited, I looked at the empty box and tried to imagine myself inside it. I tilted my head to the side, squinted, tipped it to the other side. It was hard to imagine, but I was intrigued.

Before interviews, I am nervous. I normally prepare. But for this one, I didn't know what to prepare for. What could she possibly throw at me? The extent of my preparation was blow-drying my hair and fishing through my closet for something slimming and hip, something I thought a Box Girl would wear when she's out of the box.

The art director sat across from me on another couch. We talked for a few minutes about traffic, the weather, nothing. It wasn't really an interview at all; she spoke to me as if I already had the job and was just explaining it to me. The hours, parking, that sort of thing. I'm sure she just wanted to see what I looked like and make sure I wasn't totally insane. Toward the end of our chat, she ran through the rules, stressing, “Please wear light, natural makeup,” and emphasizing “Absolutely no eye contact” twice. She asked if I had any questions. I looked at the box, shook my head, and said, “I mean, how hard could it be?”

The Zoo

A guy in a plaid flannel shirt is waving his arms overhead,
trying to get my attention. He must not know I'm not allowed to look at him. And that must, I imagine, make this whole charade even more intriguing. If you say, “Here, kitty, kitty,” and hold out your hand long enough, the animal at the zoo will at least give you a glance. She may even come over and growl, do something impressive. But I am contractually obligated to ignore you.

It's a bit peculiar to think that, if I have children someday, I will have to tell them about this job. “Oh, like the zoo!” I can hear them saying.

“Yes,” I will be obliged to say. “Like the zoo.”

But they'll already know all of this. They'll be able to mine the Internet for all sorts of former versions of their mom. As a child, I used to love looking through my parents' high school yearbooks. So involved in school activities, sports, and student government, my mom was on practically every page, smiling in her saddle shoes and Eton skirts. (As my Uncle George likes to say, she would have joined the “Tiddlywinks Club” if there
were such a thing.) In my dad's yearbook, he was voted a “Snow Man,” which he explained in the following way: “This was common slang in the sixties. A snowman was so ‘cool' that he could produce ‘snow' just by being himself. Girls in his vicinity were subject to being ‘snowed,' a phenomenon that was often totally out of their control but generally not life-threatening. However, some young ladies who got thoroughly snowed often thought their life was over when the snowman did not embrace their infatuation.” This, of course, is just one man's humble approximation of the phrase.

Sometimes, as a child, I'd find old photos in the backs of drawers or the bottoms of file cabinets. I kept one of my parents throwing a Frisbee in a park somewhere. My mom's hair was cut into a shaggy brown bob and she was wearing a short red romper. My dad, who I have never known without gray hair, had thick, golden-brown hair, styled into
muttonchops
. But the muttonchops were actually the least shocking part of the picture for me. What I really couldn't get over were his
cut-offs
. I have never in my life seen my dad out in public in anything other than pleated khaki pants. I have never seen him wear a single pair of jeans, let alone ones he took a pair of kitchen scissors to.

Other times I'd uncover a whole shoebox full of old photographs—the rounded-edge matte ones from the '70s and '80s—of my parents on a ski trip with friends, or at the beach. I loved seeing these versions of their former selves. While sometimes in the pictures it was pretty apparent that they were hammered drunk, that was about as scandalous as they got. Because, I'm sure, if there was photographic evidence of anything more illicit, those pictures would have been thrown away, or hidden in a shoebox that was harder for a child to find.

Back then, they had that luxury. They were keepers of a carefully curated photographic history. It was a much more civilized assortment. With the Internet, no matter how much
erasing or unlinking I do between now and whenever I'd have a child old enough to dig around online, it will never be enough. The illustrated history of my generation is uncontainable. It is unbridled, unregulated, relentless.

Sometimes I Play Pretend

My first husband's name was Todd. He showed up in a T-shirt
and jeans, which I thought was a touch underdressed, but he was polite and seemed like an all right husband all the same. Our child's name was Elsie. She was six years old and told me she had a zoo in her backyard. When I asked what kind of animals, she didn't have any specifics. Todd and I went through a lot together—a proposal, a pregnancy, and six-plus years of marriage—all in the fifteen minutes it took to audition for a Nationwide Insurance commercial.

The next time you are enjoying a relaxing stretch of TV, comfortably molded into your couch, take a moment to appreciate the hundreds of people who have made asses of themselves in the hopes of being in that commercial you're trying to skip.

At an audition for an “active lifestyle dating service” commercial, I recited the lines, “With my busy schedule, it's just so hard to meet people. I wish I could find someone who shares my passion for running and the outdoors”—while jogging in place. For a Cox High Speed Internet audition, I had various
household items thrown at my head—an oven mitt, a ruler, a handful of markers—while an industrial-sized fan blew my hair. For a Capri Sun audition, I stood on the sideline of a make-believe field and cheered on my make-believe son, who was apparently playing soccer with other make-believe children. For a Bear Naked granola audition, I rode on the back of a German model named Rolfe while pretending we were on a hike. (Because don't you always hike with your boyfriend piggy-back style?) And I feigned true love at a
Match.com
audition. Yes, I hate to be the one to tell you, but the people on the commercials did not actually meet on
Match.com
. They met in the lobby of a casting facility on Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood.

For some commercials, casting directors send blast notices to all of the actors who are signed up for a service called LA Casting. If an actor feels he fits the specs, he can submit himself for the project. These casting notices were a relentless assault on my inbox, a new one arriving every two to three minutes: SAG Nike Commercial, Monster Energy Drink Spec Commercial, Non-Union Target Commercial, Rush Call for Hyundai (Can anyone get to Studio City by 4:30?). I finally had to switch my LA Casting account to an old Hotmail email because these notices were draining my Blackberry's battery.

In the breakdowns, casting directors would describe the premise of the commercial and what type of actors they were looking for. I noticed they loved the word “aspirational” and always seemed to be seeking “aspirational-looking” people to cast in their commercials. How you can determine whether or not someone is “aspirational” from a headshot, I do not know. Were these actors gazing contemplatively at one corner of the headshot, like the man on the cover of
The Fountainhead?
Was one hand perched under their chin à la
Thinking Man
? I guess they just had that sparkle in their eyes.

Because I had worked on the agency end of things, I knew all the euphemisms. If the description said “Urban,” it meant “black” and “sort of gangster.” (See: Ludacris in
Crash
.) “Ethnically Ambiguous” was another one they tossed around frequently. Commercial casting directors loved ethnically ambiguous actors because they appealed to multiple markets. If they couldn't quite put their finger on what you were, all the better. I also knew that if I saw a casting notice for a “Dianetics Industrial,” it was a commercial for the Church of Scientology.