A very long time ago, my mother decided to get me into child modelling. She put me into a dress (which I hated) and took me over to Aunt's house and her beautiful, capacious garden, where Aunt took many photos of me. These photos were sent to the modelling agencies, and I was for a while called to do many auditions for television ads.
Around that time I loved nothing more than to enjoy the beautiful summer by swimming in the pool at my house. I used to collect Puppy in my Pocket, little plastic puppies frozen into various amusing or cute poses, which came with "fact cards" that stated, top trumps style, which puppies were the most intelligent, huggable, obedient, etc. How very marvellous of the manufacturers to discover a way to quantitatively measure huggability, and then relate this factor, scaled 1 to 10, to little lumps of plastic! But I digress... One of the things I enjoyed doing most with these puppies was to throw them into the pool and then go diving for them.
One day after I had become rather accomplished at diving to fetch puppies, I decided it was becoming too easy. I threw the puppies in the shallow end and decided that this time when I fetched them back to the surface I would have to do it with my teeth. It was suprisingly tricky. So it was that I dived over and over again to mash my face against the bottom of the swimming pool, mostly failing to collect puppies.
When I had finished swimming I had a huge graze spanning the length of my chin. It just so happened that I had a modelling audition the next day.
"Oh my goodness! What happened?" my mother cried when she saw me, to which I replied (rather inaccurately) that I didn't know. She pasted vast amounts of foundation over my chin the next day, until I looked like a child with a grazed chin covered in mother's make up.
I don't think I ever got to be in an ad either... I didn't act very well. One audition involved the director telling us to look really bored, because the parents have been fussing over some device that won't work for ages. One of the other children asked if we were allowed to roll our eyes. The director replied we could if we wanted to. Since I was very bored anyway, and it was the most interesting thing I could think of doing, I took this to be permission for me to stand there rolling my eyes back and forth, like they were on the end of a metronome. I didn't get picked.
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3 comments:
Ooh, I used to have a whole ice cream tub full of those puppies! And the little cards, and...
Er, I mean guns. Guns and swords and, er, manly things. I'll be going now.
The part of this story that amuses me the most is that I can TOTALLY see you doing that :P
It also amuses me to see that even when you were a child your awesome, if somewhat... unique, personality was already well on its way developing...
Huzzah! My first comments :)
Thank you very much, gentlemen. It is delightful to get a response.
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