bout a month ago, I wrote a story for a magazine. We’ll call it “Vanity Fair.”* I’d turned in the story to my editor, “Graydon Carter,”* who then emailed to say he needed a portrait of me pronto. Did I have one? Why, just the night prior, my boyfriend had taken photos of me drunk and holding the kitty cat. In one, the cat’s ears are pulled back so he look like he’s in a galeforce wind. (It’s very funny.) Would that work? “No,” Graydon said, “we need something more, uh, professional.”
All right, listen. I don’t like photos. I can’t remember ever liking photos. At least not ones of me. I have such a big ... forehead. It’s so amazingly ... shiny. Like a big bicycle reflector above my eyebrows. I don’t like cameras, and that’s why I’m a print journalist. Otherwise, I’d be a newscaster. But what can you say in a situation like this?
“Umm, sure. That sounds great.”
Later that week, “Vanity Fair” set me up with a professional photographer. We’ll call her “Annie Leibowitz.”* Before my appointment with Annie, I went to the hairstylist. Hairstylists intimidate me with their chic-ness, and I end up agreeing to all sorts of weird things that I regret later.
“Just make my hair pretty,” I told him.
“Do you want an overpriced cut that looks exactly like what you already have and hate?”
”Umm, sure. That sounds great.”
Seventy bucks lighter, I went to Annie’s loft. It was a cool, arty space with elevators that didn’t work and doors painted turquoise and crumbling. I was getting nervous and hoping Annie maybe did drugs. Personally, I don’t do drugs, but I might feel better if Annie did some.
“Do you want green tea?” she asked.
“Umm, sure. That sounds great.”
A makeup stylist showed up and unloaded a crate of tools. She sprayed foundation on my face with a pen-size tool that sparked like a blowtorch.
“That looks like a crack pipe,” I told her.
“Uh-huh.” She looked at me and smiled.
”I know because I sell crack.”
She looked at me and smiled. “Now, close your eyes and mouth,” she said. “And don’t inhale.”
The photo shoot was awkward. It’s tough to retain a natural smile. A smile held so long starts to ache and droop, starts to turn on itself. I’d catch glimpses of my reflection in the photo lens, and I looked like I was snarling.
“Scrunch up all your muscles at once and then shake it out,” Annie said. She was trying to help. “Act natural,” she said, as I tilted my head to my good side, like I was posing for Olan Mills.
After two hours and five rolls, Annie stopped clicking. “I think I got something,” she said.
Think? After five rolls? How sad is that?
”No, I’m sure I got something,” she said, as if sensing my insecurity. “You did fine. Did you have fun?”
”Umm, sure,” I said. “It was great.”

*not really Vanity Fair
*not really Graydon Carter
*obviously, this is full of lies designed to make me sound more important than I am. Like, "Oh, I just had this photo shoot with Vanity Fair, look at me be all casual about it." Very underhanded, me.