Hello, there. Here’s the deal. I’ve been sick on my ass all weekend but am almost 100 percent better thanks to my favorite good old magical acupuncturist herbs, hooray! (Oh, and if you came to Comix on Thursday– so much fun! What a great show — thanks to you — YOU totally rock.)

But yeah, me being healthy again is such great news. I’m about to go back to sleep as that is my A-game right now. But wanted to “blog” something first on the “Web.” So, you know, I decided to export and upload a video of my nieces from Christmas. Adorable! Mind-numbingly adorable. But the disk space is full on my computer. Pisser. Then, I tried to upload a cute little picture — you know one of those pictures where it’s like, WOOOO look at my life, right? Also, a no go. Double pisser. Blogger isn’t letting me upload. So now I finally went to my drafts to see what I might already have in there, and I remembered this.

It’s a story that I won a bunch of awards for when I was in college and touches (mostly at the outset) on the question about what being tall is like (like say, when you are young, gangly and don’t feel comfortable in your own skin).

So yeah, this is what being tall is like. I wrote it when I was 20.

Someone was asking me the other day, “Do you wish you were shorter?” And nope. No way. Not a chance. Because I wouldn’t be who I am. And because I wouldn’t have my rocking 6′2″ body.

You gotta own it, gurrrl (whatever you got — from Tila Tequila mini to Brooke Shields maxi), and that’s the truth.

Yeah so — here’s this story that I wrote about my experience with the modeling industry in college. It was fun to write. I wrote it in, I want to say, 1995. So that’s what I’ll say.

Oh and PS, I’ve got a busy week ahead so probably won’t post. But when I do, when I finally do, like say next week (because probably won’t have time this weekend either — FASCINATING!) I will upload the HOT MODELING PIX from me trying to be a model.

Hopefully Blogger will stop being a bitch by then. (And double PS — Operation Move Over to Moveable Type is in effect so yeah, all good.)

But yeah the modeling pics = hilarious. But kind of sexy. Sexlarious.

Oh, and triple PS? The mean quote I make about my sister in here? She’s awesome. When she wanted to set me up post-divorce, she said to comfort me when I was like, “Aren’t I too tall for that guy?” She said, “No way — more Mandy to love.”

AND quadruple PS? My description of hobbies is total bullox. I wanted to sound badass. But I’m such a square. I think I “got high” like seven times in college. And I freaking hate my Lenny Bruce records. They look cool but I’d much rather listen to Eddie Murphy.

Sexlarious.

***

“Sympathy for the Modeling Industry”
by Mandy Stadtmiller
The Daily Northwestern
1995

When I was 16, I was tall. Really, really tall. Like 6′1” tall. So the standard question for me was always either: “Oh you play basketball?” or if I was looking especially cute that day “You must be a model!” Unfortunately I was neither. Just a tall, gangly kid who liked to wear dresses with jeans to Catholic school.

So when a seemingly legitimate agent approached me about making a three-hour trek from San Diego to Irvine, Calif., to “test” for some other agents, I agreed. I figured, if this is something I can do and pay for college really easily, then great. It’ll be a snap: Parade around, suck in my gut and smear a little Vaseline on my teeth.

Oh, but if only it were so painless. Walking around for the scattered agents, I had never felt like such an ugly, disfigured piece of flesh. Worse even than when my sister used to call me the jolly green giant.

They criticized me like I wasn’t even there as I stood in front of the camera and walked up and down.

“What do you think?” “She’s OK. I don’t know, honey, turn around and walk this way. Loosen up, you’re way too tight.” “Her cheeks are pretty big.” “It’s baby fat.” “Honey, when you smile, don’t show your gums.” ” She needs to lose weight, definitely.”"Are you sure that’s baby fat?” Needless to say, I never dropped my last name or hosted “The Grind” or anything. Did develop a new anxiety about my huge cheeks though.

So I went to a professional to explain it to me.

Michael Gross, the author of “Model: The ugly business of beautiful women” and former New York Times fashion critic had the dirt. He decoded for me both the seedy underbelly and the high-fashion intrigue, America’s perverse fascination with waifs and supermodel transvestite rock singers, as well as the very expensive charm schools like Barbizon that cloak themselves in promises to make you become a model or just look like one.

“Look, only a couple of angels can dance on the head of a pin, right?” Gross said in an interview from his New York home. “And what those schools are about is making money from all the kids who are never going to make it to the head of the pin.”

Gross liked to talk in metaphors. He did it very well.

For any girl starting out , there’s risks. “It’s the deep end of a swimming pool filled with sharks. If you learn to swim real fast, you can do great. If you don’t, you can get chewed up or drowned and if you’re lucky, you’ll climb out before you get damaged.”

Girls also need to be aware of the tradition of agents who have an affection for young girls. John Casablancas, the founder of Elite, is married to his third wife. She is a model. She is 18.

“If you take a heterosexual man and you plunk him into a business where the product is beautiful teenage women, he would have to have the restraint of a saint not to make a mistake. Look, genetically, biologically, young women are alluring and the odds of finding a heterosexual man in the modeling business who is absolutely clean? That’s going to be like panning for gold in a Manhattan sewer.”

The safest entry into this pool of sharks is with a couple of Polaroid snaps and a visit to a legitimate agency like Ford or Elite (Elite-Chicago has open call between 11:30 and noon on Thursdays). Charm and finishing schools can be dangerous when girls are given a false outline of their chances for success.

“Clearly, when a little girl of 5′6” who’s not terribly pretty walks into one of those places thinking she’s going to be Cindy Crawford, they’re preying on dreams and they have no interest in giving her a realistic picture of her chances,” Gross said. “If you’ve got what it takes to be a model, you don’t need to go to a modeling school. Period. 100 percent.”

So I decided to try my luck at one. I’m still tall — taller even! And now I had the reserve not to leave an agency in tears. Now I laugh about it. I talked to the effusive Barbizon lady who also liked to speak in metaphors. She wasn’t quite as good as Michael.

“We can’t pull rabbits out of hats, but we’ll work with you if we need to,” Kate Metcalf, scout extraordinaire, told me. Bitchy. Concise. I liked her already.

I arrived an hour late to the appointment and got to watch the promotional film — twice! The girls of Barbizon, it seems, especially like the music video portion of their training. As Paula Abdul’s “Opposites Attract” droned in the background, the heavily made-up and severely sprayed girls strutted to the best of their ability without a cartoon cat jamming alongside. It was pretty hard not to be excited as I filled out the questionnaire. I tapped my shoes to “I make the bed/He steals the covers” and tried to answer the question, “What are my hobbies?” Somewhat inspired by the grinning blonde on the catalogue in front of me with the slogan that said “Go For It!,” I penned in carefully, “Listening to old Lenny Bruce records, trying to play the guitar and getting high with my friends.”

Glancing through the 72-hour curriculum, I wondered if I had what it took to graduate from “Personality Plus Developement” and “Developing Fashion Flair” to the big-time courseload: “Developing Model Manners,” “The Model as an Actress” and “Understanding Color Analysis.” Guys with ratty long hair and smudgy tans walked in and out of the silver wallpapered office. Girls with very distinct hats fluttered by. Some wore bright orange, others didn’t. When Miss Metcalf (the first thing you learn at Barbizon is manners) called me into her office, she disapproved of my casual attire, told me to sit up straight and looked through my pictures. I hardly let it bother me; I was drunk with excitement. Pretty soon I would be reading a sample hand detergent ad! Miss Metcalf said that I was versatile and she had me walk around to see what I knew about runway.

“Couldn’t I be signed and then be taught the necessary skills?” I asked.

She looked at me in disbelief. “You obviously don’t know anything about the modeling industry,” she said. Miss Metcalf was to repeat this saying throughout the night. “You sound pretty confused. Let me explain it to you again, Barbizon has been around for over half a century and is a commercially licensed agency.” I stopped arguing.

She took me back to her office and told me the sad, hard truth. “I think you just don’t take this seriously enough,” she said. “You photograph well and are tall enough, but I just don’t know if you can make the commitment right now.”

I was mortified. I told her I was extremely serious.

She quickly saw that I had turned around. “Well then we’d love to have you in our class.” she said. “We only take 16 girls so space is limited.” Then she went into all the details of entering the glamorous world of music videos, professional voice projection and wardrobe accessorization. “There’s a $165 down payment and then there’s 24 classes that you take.”

“Well, $165 isn’t going to break anybody,” I said.

“Then there’s the 24 weekly payments of $40 each. We have one plan where you can pay in full for $1,275 and another where you can budget it for a $1,345 total.”

I was on my way to the big time. For a steal.

THE REAL THING

Chris Garber greeted me at Elite-Chicago with a huge smile and a handshake. He was a relatively good-looking guy who used to be a model back in the ’80s until Elite dropped him because he “wasn’t strong enough.” Surrounding Garber were framed magazine covers of beautiful women and Polaroid shots of teenagers they had spotted around the country and hoped to develop. He took me over to some of the prospectives where messages were pinned up next to them. “Told her my honest opinion,” one sign read. (“There has to be something in the eyes. And she looked dead. Out of all of her test shots, we got one and we should have trouble choosing,” Garber said.)

“This one I’m really excited about,” he said, pointing to a cute girl with short hair and braces. “We’ve got a lot of work to do because she’s so green. She doesn’t know how to be a woman. She sits down totally slumped over.”

Garber and other representatives travel on the weekends to scout new talent. They see upwards of 1,000 girls who show them a couple of snapshots and appear before them with no make-up and form-fitting clothes. The scouts are lucky if they find even one girl to use.

“I hate to say flaws,” Garber said, when I pressed him to define what would disqualify a girl. “And I always say, ‘You’re beautiful, kid.’ But my industry has certain requirements, and I may look at somebody and say, you know, ‘I think your eyes are too close.’ I wouldn’t say that to them. Or, ‘ Your nose is not quite right.’ Again I wouldn’t say it, but I would deduct it inside my little brain, that the nose is not quite right — it might come up a little bit at the end. Or the upper lip is too thin or the chin is too weak or their body proportions are not right, their legs are too short and they have a long torso, you know.”

Garber arranged for me to meet with three models. One who is on the cusp of becoming a “million-dollar girl.” A second who was just signed with the agency and has only been working for four months. And a third girl who is a college student from Norway.

Mariann Molsky was the first woman. She is 18 years old and three years ago won the Elite Look of the Year contest, a make-or-break talent search within the agency. (Cindy Crawford didn’t even place when she first started out with Elite after dropping out of Northwestern.)

“I’m looking for someone like Mariann Molsky, who is legs for days, beautiful, perfectly balanced face, and somebody who has it within her grasp — with our help within the next two years, to be a great, great model,” Garber says, his eyes lighting up. “And that takes so much work. Everybody thinks it’s the limousines and the caviar and the parties, but they don’t understand that it is a lot of hard work.”

Molsky is working on runway extensively right now, every day until she leaves for New York on Sunday. There are over 20 moves she has to get just right.

“Every day will get more intense,” Garber said. “Her nails were like claws this morning, and now you’ll notice they’re clipped all the way back. This is stuff girls need to learn.”

Molsky has a husky voice and a flirtatious way of rolling her eyes and pursing her lips when she’s annoyed. She only got into this business for one reason.

“Just for the money,” said the Des Plaines, Ill., native (just like Cindy!). “Nothing else really.”

How does she feel about the connotations of anorexia, partying and vapidity associated with girls in her profession?

She thinks about it for a minute, giggles a husky giggle and responds. “I don’t know really.”

Why did she get into the business in the first place?

“I don’t remember. It sounded like a fun thing to do because they did, like, hair and make-up.”

She now gets paid $1,250 a day and has a contract with Cover Girl.

“A lot of people say that they overpay us, but if you take into consideration that you have to travel. I mean, if you didn’t have to travel, I could see them paying you less.”

Model No. 2 was a girl with the lushest lips I have ever seen. She wants to be an interior decorator. She was picked out of hundreds of girls at a new talent search.

“I was like,’Oh.’ I totally didn’t expect it,” says 15-year-old Dianka Arcos, of Buffalo, Ill. The changes have been minor since working with Elite-Chicago. “I got a haircut — just a couple of inches. That’s it. And now I’m getting my eyebrows done, plucked. Whatever makes me look better,” she said smiling.

Bodil Bjerkvik, 21, treats the camera as she would a stage performance and will play with whatever role suits her. “I like to act,” she said. “One day I’m a primadonna in front of the camera and am walking down the street and five guys are following me with their cameras, and the next day I’ll be in school, studying about politics — historical stuff.”

All three girls have the chance to become huge. Right now it’s Mariann’s moment. “She has the potential to be a million-dollar girl,” Garber said. Her meeting with John Casablancas could lead to a flurry of editorial work, eventually some big-name cosmetic contracts, and then she might become a “special girl” like Linda Evangalista or Cindy Crawford.

“She got a letter,” Garber said, pausing to emphasize the significance, “from John, saying that he was happy to see that she had changed her psyche a little bit and he said that he’d like to have a meeting with her again. But you have to walk through the door and into his office and just do it. How do you walk around a corner and sit in a chair and act like a star? How do you do it?”

Gross, the modeling expert, said that is the precise reason why people are fascinated with models.

“There are very, very few places in the world where beauty and mystery coincide anymore,” Gross said. “Movie stars aren’t glamorous anymore. Movie stars are too private. Movie stars wear sweat clothes and go on Oprah and tell us how they were molested by their parents. Models are not paid to speak, therefore, they’re blank screens and we project our fantasies on to them.”

But the fantasies have dimmed over the years. The public opinion that helped thrust Cindy and Claudia into the limelight isn’t holding up the latest crop of new faces.

“I would submit to you that if you walked into a mall out near Northwestern, and found some 17-year-old boy with pimples and a beer t-shirt on, and you asked him to name a model, he would name Claudia or Cindy, not Shalom or Amber. OK?” Gross said. “And I think that that would be proof of the theory that the supermodel thing is over. They pushed it too far. They committed hubris. They flew too close to the sun and it’s melting their wings.”