Admin

The Personal Assistant - “Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow”

July 28, 2008

After the photo shoot, my next task was to go develop all the pictures at a one-hour place, so she could look through them over the weekend. Guess how many pictures there were… eight-five? A hundred and fifty? Three-hundred and eighty-seven! Luckily, digital cameras are around; can you imagine what a waste of film that would have been otherwise? (I know this sounds mean, but come on; 387 pictures?!) I get the 387, 4”x6” photos developed and hand them off to Chloe; she looks happier than I’d ever seen her. She tells me she’ll see me Monday morning.

On Monday, she hands me her favorite fifty three. Yes, only fifty-three. She wants 8 ½” x 11” ones made of these, “So I can decide which one I like the best,” she says. The rest, she wants me to make a collage of, get framed, and put up in the office she and I share. So if we subtract fifty-three from three hundred and eighty-seven, we get three-hundred and thirty-four pictures… of herself. I laugh to myself (and only myself) and do as I am told…

The framing of all the snapshots alone costs nearly a thousand dollars. I love how people spend oodles of other peoples’ money. Such insanity. Her poor husband. And she hasn’t had an audition in weeks… She sends me to the grocery store (for everything from sugar-free ice cream to organic chives) as she goes through the fifty-three headshots with the magnifying thingy she insisted I buy for her, just like the ones real photographers use.

I come back to find that she has chosen her ten favorite photos (after telling me how difficult it was to choose). One of them is the photo where she’s hanging upside-down from the monkey bars, remember? (Combine how funny that is, in and of itself, with her ridiculous-looking hair extensions, and you’ve got a real winner. By the way, I should mention that her hair extensions have not gotten any better looking since last week; she still looks like a drag queen… I suppose wearing less make-up would help remedy this, but that’s a whole other blog entry.)

Then she tells me that she has a new project ready for me. (Yippee!) She wants me to make fifty, 4”x6” photos of each picture and use them as postcard invitations for a party she’s having… for her new hair. Yes, she wants to have a “Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow” party, complete with my writing that in calligraphy on every invite. I can’t wait… I remind myself it’s better than buying her and Dean condoms… and better than accidentally setting their bedroom on fire… and leave with the stack of pictures in an envelope under my arm.