An original essay in our occasional series from authors on the road:

Shoot

by Gayle Brandeis

My sister is on the original Star Wars Play–Doh box. Her dark blonde hair is so slick with Aquanet, it looks almost black. You can see a touch of lip gloss on her five–year–old mouth, some blush on her baby–fat cheeks. A moist yellow Darth Vader stands in front of her hand. The box, with or without the crumbly Play–Doh remains inside, sells for upwards of $100 now.

My sister got some great gigs — Jello and Biz Bleach commercials, a gourmet magazine centerfold spread, posed next to a towering gingerbread house. She even graced a 1977 cover of Volume Feeding Institutions Magazine as a pint size women’s libber, holding a sign that says, “WOMAN’S WORK IS NEVER DONE.”

My brief stint as a child model was not nearly so successful, my mementos not nearly so cool. I had the nasty habit of crying whenever a camera was trained at me, not to mention a tendency to go mute during auditions. On the rare occasion I was offered a job, it usually called for a slightly sullen child, like the print ad for an insurance agency that featured me as a disgruntled Girl Scout.

My big break came when the Spiegel people called. Spiegel catalogs were pure pornography for me — I drooled over the glossy pages of the thick book, stoking my fevered nine–year–old fantasies of fiber optic lamps and polyester pantsuits and dolls that could eat and pee. My first published work — a letter to Santa in the local paper — was essentially a hand written, slightly embellished, Spiegel catalog shopping list.

My mom drove me to the photo shoot. My yellow t–shirt and lime green gauchos felt a bit scratchy; the silky, faux–Hermes scarf she had knotted around my neck made me swallow funny. The Spiegel people had asked me to dress in yellow and green to match the Crayola logo, since I’d be demonstrating the company’s “Home Art Studio.” I felt good about that. Art was something I understood. I liked art. I might not even have to cry.

The first thing the photographers did, much to my mother’s disappointment, was remove the scarf. They tied bows of thick green yarn around my pony tail holders. They led me to the set, a faux family room, complete with pale wood paneling and brown shag carpet. An easel was set up there. The one side facing the camera already had a painting pinned to it, obviously done by an adult who was trying to paint like a kid — a yellow house, a yellow sun, a few washes of blue for the sky, a tree. The grass was only partially painted in. “Linda” was written at the bottom, in large, studiously childish, letters.

They handed me a paintbrush. “Pretend to paint the grass,” they said. I started to sweep the brush across the paper like I was in the midst of a creative frenzy.

“No!” they yelled. “Just hold it against the painting.”

I held that paintbrush there for what felt like ages. My arm got more and more tired, and I got more and more pissed off. I was not Linda. This was not my painting. I made a promise to myself that I would never do anything like this again. I would make my own art. I wouldn’t be any fake stand in.

When it came time to take my author photo for my book Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, I thought it would be a piece of cake. I was going to be myself, not Linda; I was going to be representing something I had created, not posing with some pre–painted schlock. I knew who I wanted to take the picture; I had been at a coffee house gallery a few months before and was spellbound by a series of gorgeous, sensual, photos of pregnant women. If the photographer could capture the ripeness of pregnancy, I figured she could capture a woman in a normal body, too.

I gave Marsha a call and we set up a time for a photo shoot the next week. She was lively, funny, easy to talk to; I was very excited to work with her. Before we hung up, she said she’d schedule an appointment at a salon so I could get my hair and makeup done before the shoot. I rarely brush my hair, so I knew I didn’t want my hair to be too “done”, and I absolutely froze at the mention of makeup. I don’t wear makeup. I am uncomfortable in makeup. The only makeup I know how to put on is stage makeup, and that would definitely be all wrong for a book that espouses being your truest, most organic self. I told her all these things, but she said, “You’ll need makeup. It’s black and white. Your face will get all bleached out without it. You’ll lose your features.” I hemmed and hawed. She said she’d make the appointment and I could duke it out with the stylist if I wanted. I grudgingly agreed, then called her a few hours later in a panic.

“I really don’t want to wear make up,” I told her.

“You won’t be happy with the pictures,” she said. “Trust me.”

I wanted to trust her, but my gut was demanding even more attention. “Can we at least do some shots with and some without?” I asked her, hoping to come to some compromise.

“Sure,” she sighed. “But we’ll have do the ‘after’ shots first, okay? I’m not going to see you until after the salon, and the stylist isn’t coming here with you.”

At the salon, I discussed my concerns with the stylist as she spritzed me with Aveda products.

“It won’t be so bad,” she cooed. “Let me show you a woman I did.”

She handed me a test shot of a woman lounging with her two sons. The woman looked clownish, so much makeup was plastered onto her face. The sons looked great. My heart paused in my chest.

“The sons don’t have makeup,” I said. “I want to look like the sons.”

“But, honey,” she scolded, “You’re a woman!”

“A woman who doesn’t wear makeup!”

After some more squabbling, the stylist ended up calling the photographer. They kvetched about my stubbornness for awhile, then agreed to keep the makeup as subtle as possible, just enough to keep my face from fading away. I was very grateful. I didn’t want to be turned into Linda — something someone else created, someone else’s idea of how a picture should look.

I drove to Marsha’s studio, glancing at my lightly painted face in the driver’s side mirror. I had to admit, the make up was kind of fun — it was me, just amped up a little bit. I tried to get the rest of myself amped up, too. I was having my author photo taken, after all. My book, hallelujah, was actually going to be published. I should have been ecstatic, but I felt like I was going to throw up.

Marsha was just as great in person as she was on the phone, but it took awhile for me to relax in front of her lens.

“Maybe you should take your clothes off,” she sighed. “You seem like the kind of person who’d be more comfortable out of your clothes.”

“Not in front of the camera,” I laughed, trying to quell a rising sense of panic.

“What do you want to do?” she asked me. We had moved outside at this point. I decided to sit under a tree. I kind of plopped into a position that was comfortable for me, my legs kind of wide apart, bent at the knee (“Sexy,” she smiled.) I felt relaxed in front of the camera for the first time all day. We took more pictures there, some around the rest of the yard. I changed clothes a couple of times. Marsha let me borrow a velvet skirt that she said people usually wear in topless shots. I was tempted to take off my shirt. I started to feel silly. When she asked me to do some serious “I am an Author” shots, I couldn’t keep a straight face.

I felt happy and exhausted on the drive home. I glanced in the mirror and realized with a start that I still had make up on; we never did do any “before” shots. I decided to not let myself get upset about it. If I hated the pictures, we could always take more, makeup free.

The proofs were ready a few days later. Out of six rolls of film, I liked less than a handful of pictures. Marsha’s photography was wonderful, but I didn’t recognize myself in most of the shots. In many of them, I look a little bit too soft–focus and day–dreamy; in others, I look way too stiff and self–conscious. The one picture I liked the most — the one that ended up on my book jacket––was the one under the tree, the one she shot when she asked me what I wanted to do. Even with the makeup, it looked just like me.

About a year later, it was time to take the photo for my first novel, The Book of Dead Birds. I always feel cheated when authors use the same photo on more than one book, so I didn’t want to use the same picture. This time, I vowed, there would be no makeup involved.

My husband borrowed a friend’s fancy schmancy camera and we drove down to the Salton Sea, where most of the novel takes place––it’s in the middle of the Southern California desert, and is the most bizarre, deserted, landscape you can imagine. Our son Arin spent the day at a friend’s, but our daughter Hannah joined us on our quest. On the way there, we ate lunch at The Wheel Inn, immortalized in Pee Wee's Big Adventure (it’s the diner where Pee Wee tells people “Large Marge sent me.” There are two humongous plaster dinosaurs outside; you can buy souvenirs in the belly of the brontosaurus, or watch the sunset from the T–rex's mouth.) It was a suitably surreal beginning to a suitably surreal day.

I spent most of the day squinting into the sun (the desert light is very intense) in one locale or another — the sunken trailer park, the abandoned boat–shaped yacht club, the jetty covered with fish bones, the playground that's half–buried in barnacles. The air smelled very sulfurous. The stench changes there, depending on algae blooms or fish die–offs or bird die–offs. There was a red tide of algae that day. Our daughter, who is sensitive to smells, was not very happy about this.

When we were out on the jetty, a man came up to us shaking his fist and telling us we had to move our car, the only car in an otherwise empty parking lot, because emergency vehicles wouldn't be able to get through if there was a problem. He went on to tell us, in graphic detail, about a little girl who split her leg open on an iron bar out there and needed 22 stitches. Then he said he was out of breath and hobbled away. We were the only people there. If there had been an emergency, no one would have heard us, anyway. Our daughter, who is also sensitive to potential danger, began to whine even more.

Later, as we were taking some pictures by another stretch of shoreline, two drunk guys drove up and started hooting at me from their car, telling me to “take it off!” This felt very different from Marsha’s suggestions to disrobe at my previous photo shoot. When Matt glared at them, they said they were just “checkin' out his lady”. Then they started talking about some family that had been killed nearby; I was probably just being paranoid, but it sounded like they were taking credit for the crime. I didn’t want my photo shoot to end with shooting, with photos of our bloody bodies splayed across the newspaper. Hannah’s freak out began to reach biblical proportions. We decided we were done for the day.

When we had the photos developed, it turned out I was squinting in almost all of them. There were two that I kind of liked, although my eyes looked a little weird, and my hair was blowing all over my face. I sent them to HarperCollins, but they didn’t think they would work; my face was too obscured, and the exposure wasn’t quite right. There wasn’t time for another photo shoot. My editor suggested we use the Fruitflesh picture, but I didn’t want to repeat myself, plus the novel seemed more “serious“ than Fruitflesh to me, and I didn’t want to look too happy on the cover. I combed through the proofs of my photo shoot with Marsha and found a serious–bordering–on–grim (though lipsticked) shot, that, at the last minute, seemed like it could work. I am not terribly happy with my decision, although I am happy that Harper decided to zap it down to thumb–nail size on the cover. They ended up using my Fruitflesh shot for their PR purposes, probably because it looked friendlier than the shooting–daggers novel photo.

Maybe I’ll get my next photo shoot right. I won’t wear make up. I won’t squint or snarl. No one will ask me to take off my clothes. Maybe, instead, I’ll draw a picture of myself, or take a photo of the back of my head. Or maybe I won’t include a photo at all; maybe I’ll just write an extra thousand words to make up for the missing image. I’ll disappear into the text, just like I do when I write. That appeals to me a lot. It could be the best way to prove to myself that Linda is gone for good.

The writer: Gayle Brandeis is a writer and dancer who lives in Riverside with her husband and two children. She is the author of The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins 2003) and Fruitfresh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperSanFrancisco) and Dictionary Poems (Pudding House Publications).

See Gayle at her website, www.gaylebrandeis.com.

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