Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (22 page)

Billowing pants:
Once, a stylist for a famous women’s fashion magazine dressed me in massive charcoal gray pants with a drawstring. They looked like something a sad clown might wear running errands. Maternity tops billed as “Grecian style” are a relative of billowing pants.

Daisy print:
I think there’s something about daisies or daisy prints that stylists consider synonymous with “cheerful, simple, fat woman.”

Honestly, I feel like some stylists would put me in a hot dog costume and try to convince me that in Paris all the girls are dressing like the Oscar Mayer wiener, just to cover up my body.

In 2011,
People
magazine named me one of the Most Beautiful English-Speaking Persons in North America, in a countrywide vote where I just fucking destroyed. But I don’t need to remind you of this; you probably have the page torn out and stuck on your fridge as inspiration. In all seriousness, it was an amazing surprise, and I was very flattered and excited. I would even say it was an honor to be singled out for my looks, but I don’t think I could in good conscience write something that silly in a book that teenage girls might read.

In case you thought the photo shoot that produced that image in
People
went seamlessly—pun intended and relished—here’s what happened:

The photo shoot took place on a Saturday at a public elementary school about an hour away from Hollywood. As I drove there, I got more and more excited, chatting with my mom and promising her I’d send photos. I was set to do the shoot with my
Office
costar Ellie Kemper, who is a close friend and one of my favorite people.

A charismatic and almost incomprehensible French stylist took me to a trailer filled with gowns. It was like walking through Saddam Hussein’s niece’s closet. Organza, tulle, and silk filled the trailer from floor to ceiling; rhinestones and feathers were everywhere. Each gown was more elaborate and gorgeous than the one before. And they were all a size zero.

The stylist had not brought any non-samples. The only thing that came close to my size was a shapeless navy shift, which I didn’t want to wear because of my aforementioned feelings about navy, and also because it looked like what Judi Dench might wear to the funeral of someone she didn’t care that much about. I looked around for other options. There were none.

I excused myself by saying I needed to use the bathroom, which, since we were shooting in an elementary school, was the same one the kids used during the day. I went into a stall, sat down on a kid-size toilet, and cried. Why didn’t I just lose twenty pounds so I never had to be in this situation again? Life was so much easier for the actresses who did that. Was my problem that I was this food monster destined to only wear navy shifts? Lots of stupid people were skinny, and yet I couldn’t do this incredibly simple thing they could do with seeming ease.

I reached for some toilet paper to wipe my tears and saw that the dispenser was empty. I sighed and went to the next stall. No toilet paper. I went to another stall. In this stall there was toilet paper, and there was something else. There was a small amount of excrement smeared on the wall, and next to it, in black Sharpie pen, someone had scrawled, “This school is bullshit!”

I laughed out loud. Even at this fancy photo shoot, we could not escape the angry, immature graffiti of a mad little kid smearing shit on the wall. I loved this tiny, disgusting rebellion. I don’t know why, but it made me feel better. “This photo shoot is bullshit,” I thought, and went back to the room of gowns.

They were steaming the navy gown in anticipation of my arrival. I walked past the stylist and over to the other gowns. I picked my favorite one, an ornate dusty rose pink gown with a lace train.

ME:
This is the one I’m going to wear.

STYLIST GUY
(gently, as if to a fragile idiot): Zees will not fit you.

ME:
Oh man, then we’d better get the seamstress to make this one fit, huh? We don’t have too much time!

STYLIST GUY:
She is only here for zee small alterations, not zee large-scale reworking of zee gown.

That’s when I decided to just pretend as though I somehow had the power (in this weird situation, where no one was boss) to end arguments and make decisions.

ME:
Well, I don’t know what to say, because I just don’t think I’d feel comfortable in anything but that.

When I played the “I don’t feel comfortable” card, he knew it was over. “I don’t feel comfortable” is the classic manipulative girl get-my-way line. It’s right up there with “I don’t feel entirely safe.” Was it fair? Nope. Was it cool? Absolutely not. But it also wasn’t fair or cool for him to have brought three dozen size-zero gowns to my photo shoot.

In the end, the seamstress literally cut open the back of one of the gowns and quickly added about a foot of canvas material to the back, pinned it together, and put it on me. The stylist was near tears at the destruction of the gown, but it fit like a glove—er, a glove that is kind of ugly and makeshift on the back. But on the front? Perfection. I love you, canvas. I love you, safety pins. If I ever do a voice in a Disney movie where I’m the princess whose friends are a bunch of inanimate household objects who come to life, I hope mine are a swatch of canvas and some sassy safety pins.

Later, in our gowns, I took Ellie to the bathroom and showed her the shit-stained graffiti. Ellie loved it, as I knew she would. I spent the rest of the shoot having a blast and posing goofily for photos with my pal, like the awesome, Most Beautiful, and Least Dressable, Girl that I was.

These Are the Narcissistic Photos in My BlackBerry

I
WOULD RATHER
have someone read my diary than look at my iPod playlists. It’s not because I have embarrassing playlists called “Setting the Mood for Sex-Time” or whatever. My playlists are humiliating because my workout mixes have dorky titles, like “Go for It, Girl!” and “You Can Do It, Mindy!” You might also see that some of my playlists are simply two songs on repeat fifteen times, like I’m a psycho getting pumped up to murder the president.

My BlackBerry photos, on the other hand, make me laugh. They are all horribly, horribly narcissistic. My BlackBerry camera has proven to exist primarily as a mirror to see if my makeup came out okay. The other ones are my favorite people who I want to look at all the time. I thought I’d share them all, uncensored.

1. I was on my way to a taping of
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
and I wanted to see if the zit I had on the center of my forehead had shrunk. This is a different zit than the one I had when I was twenty-two, which was in the same spot and which I wrote about earlier in this book, but perhaps it was a descendant of that zit? It was so huge that Rainn Wilson advised me not to do the talk show appearance. I really wanted to go on
The Late Late Show,
though, because I love Craig Ferguson, so I popped it with a safety pin sterilized with hot water in the women’s restroom. A blood blob formed and dried up, and I was able to flick the crust off for the show, but you can still kind of see it.

2. I was on my way to the GQ Man of the Year Party. There was absolutely no reason for me to be there, but I’d heard Drake might perform. I did my own hair and I wanted to see if it looked awful.

3. I also wanted to see if my dress was too low-cut. I ultimately decided it was not too low-cut, but while wearing it, I had to keep my hands hovering over my cleavage, as though I were constantly overheated, like an old-timey Southern woman from a cartoon.

4. Yes, I am with my two best friends Brenda and Jocelyn who are very dear to me, blah blah, but this photo is more significant because it is a rare time where my head looks normal size. I have an
enormous
head, so it is important to me to have a few flattering, head-minimizing photos, in case I ever need to use them for one of those birthday cakes that have photographic icing.

5. I wasn’t positive I could pull off big, black plastic glasses, so I took this photo. If you ever need to be a well-read, artsy hipster in a hurry you should really have big black plastic-framed glasses.

6. Now I needed to make sure I could pull off the glasses when I wasn’t smiling. I look so f’ing cool here. I’m basically Claire Danes.