So, Toronto. I don’t even know where to begin. Just go get a drink and make sure you’re comfortable because this will be a long one.
First of all, I`m so far gone from my small town bubble that its kind of laughable, really. Did I actually ever used to live here? Has it really been this long since I rode the rocket, fast-walked my way through throngs of other city dwellers, eager to get to their destination, the next big thing?
I landed yesterday, groggy and tired from contortionist sleeping positions on the plane. Kris and I went to her place located in downtown TO, changed, gabbed, then headed out again to shop, eat dinner etc. It was so amazing to see her, to slip right back into a conversation we left off, what, a year ago? It was as all good friendships should be, effortless, easy.
But enough about yesterday, as lovely and reminiscent of high school and fun yesterday was, it was bullshit compared to TODAY.
First of all we went to get manicures and pedicures, and, look I live in a small town, pedicures are not something that happen every day. PLUS I have been wearing sandals, like, all summer. And gardening, in DIRT. But still, STILL, the sorry condition of my feet did NOT warrant the amount of chatter and snickering coming from the sweet asian ladies doing the manicuring and pedicuring. I GET IT! My feet were in rough shape, OK? But do we need to be jerks about it? I wish I could have had Mr. Costanza there to interpret for me, because that shit was brutal.
ANYWAY. Despite thinking I live in a world where regular foot maintenance is apparently non-existent, they did an amazing job and my toes are a generic pink-orange and my fingers look a little something like the picture below.
After I was done being mocked, we were running late so we booked it home via the subway, ran to Claire’s to get some cheap accessories including bright blue feather earrings and a white snakeskin clutch. Oh, and a fake diamond wedding ring that I could throw to the ground in a fit of passion to prove to Ryan how serious I was about our relationship (See, Adam, it wasn’t my REAL ring! This is all a joke! But I haven’t heard from you in a while and I’m kind of worried -we’re cool, right? Hello? Adam?)
Fully accessorized we sprinted to Kris’s to grab our dresses (which were matching, incidentally….and that’s a long story, at the end of which lies a totally legit reason for this type of rookie shenanigan but I can’t get into it right now because I have to get to the part where I meet Ryan Gosling. YES. The REAL Ryan Gosling, not the movie poster version that headlines this post.)
We frantically tried to do our hair but we only had 15 minutes and originally I had envisioned a sort of bohemian mermaid braid coming around the top of my head and then meeting the rest of my hair in a low messy bun in the back. Cute right? Except we hadn’t scheduled a hair appointment and I don’t know how to do anything I’ve just described. So, that was a problem.
Also a problem was the fact that I had decided not to wash my hair that day because everyone always says that slightly dirty hair is easier to work with. Haven’t you heard that? You’ve heard that right? Ok well here’s another TIP for ya, they meant dirty like, texturized, not, dirty as in plane travel, humidity, sweat, etc etc.
So my hair = disaster but we ran out of time so I just sort of side parted it and tried to back comb it into having some volume, thinking “When we get makeup done I can fiddle with it some more and the makeup will detract from the hair debacle anyway, so, whatever.”
We jumped back onto the subway and went to get our glamour photos done. Except, when we got there, the makeup artist… wasn’t. There was some sort of confusion with the booking and she had left twenty minutes earlier and wasn’t coming back. We were now stuck, bare-faced and (in my case) shitty haired. One of the guys suggested going around the corner to Shoppers (!) and having them do our makeup there. Our heads were screaming “Fuck no!” but our faces were like, “Yeah, I guess this is our only option.”
Cut to twenty minutes later when Kris is STILL in the makeup chair with some crazy lady while I am in a dirty bathroom back at the studio trying to do my own smoky eyes and nude lips (god DAMMIT) with the few beauty supplies I’d brought in my purse. I kept getting texts from Kris saying things like “She’s taking forever!” and “Eeek I need more vodka to deal with this eyeshadow” and “I think she’s stoned!”
Meanwhile, as I am doing what I can with my makeup, a lady wanders in who happens to be the booking agent for the modelling agency that’s beside the photo studio. I tell her the situation and she says she’s been to cosmetology school and can do it for me and I think to myself, YES! it’s all coming up Madeleine!
EXCEPT (you saw this one coming) she too was batshit insane and I really should have stopped her when she took my brow powder/wax and started smearing it in great wild clumps all over my brow bones and eyelids. And I definitely should have stopped her when she broke out the liquid eyeliner and applied it well over half a centimetre away from my actual lashline and then finished the whole episode of fuckery by taking out my cream blush and swiping it directly onto my cheeks in a straight line, then half-heartedly finger blending it, almost as an afterthought.
I kept thinking “Lady, are you messing with me? Is this a joke?” I had no way of knowing, except I think she really did think what she was doing was in some way acceptable, because she kept exclaiming how great it felt to get “back into the swing of things” and how she would book me in an instant – “Have you ever thought about modeling honey? You have a great face”. And talking over and over about how ”high fashion” I looked.
Guys, when I looked in the mirror a lot of descriptives sprang to mind, but “high fashion” was not one of them. My face looked so tragic and busted that I had no words. I HAD NO WORDS.
Great smeary clumps of brow wax were all over my eyelids, my eyeliner sat atop the whole mess like a strange divider between lid and lash and my blush, my BLUSH! I stammered an effusive thank you because, really, she was just trying to help but come ON lady!
We wasted another 15 minutes while I tried to scrub that mess off my face.
And then, and THEN we met our photographer: Moses.
…Part II here