Model Friends

Meaning this quite literally. My girlfriend is a supermodel. It’s not easy, because I don’t see her a lot. Or technically I see her a lot, but not as often as I would like to. But I have accompanied her to all sorts of places, and met quite a few of her friends, who are not, as one might surmise, all beautiful people all the time.

And I’ve just realized that we have been together for close to seven years. Dear God. That’s a long time. That’s longer than nearly all the wives my father has had. Amazing. All these therapy sessions are really bringing out surprising revelations for me.

I met my girlfriend through one of my best buddies. He may be a stodgy old bank officer now, but twenty years ago he was very well on her way up the modeling career ladder. The agency’s star, as it were.  But he left the company because the jobs weren’t really regular enough to pay the rent; plus being a female model didn’t suit him at all. But he retained his friends from those times ( models are very open minded people. So much that some of them have even had their brains fall out. Wonderful, no?) and those friends love having him over to size up the newbies, and on occasion, give advice to the ones who want out about getting a “proper” career and what it’s like to work a nine to five job.

The latter was how my friend met her. Obviously she wasn’t looking to get out of modeling – she was already well off enough to not need to worry particularly about surviving if she was out of work. She was more interested in learning. Just learning. About anything at all. And that quite piqued my friend’s interest. He called me up and told me that he had met someone fun and I should go check her out at this runway party next week downtown. The following, as it is too commonly said, was history.

In any case, I will return to the topic. Having been with her for so long, I’ve of course met many of her friends, most of whom are relatively top tier models, and actually befriended a few of them. It is true that they are rake thin, but definitely untrue that they are less intelligent than any other person I know.  Very many of the ones I know have backgrounds in the arts, like acting or dancing and a lot of them actually hold other jobs, especially in performance arts. All of the models whom I have found interesting have university degrees. My girlfriend, not to boast, is the most beautiful and intelligent person I have ever had the privilege to know. And not all the models I know are female. Quite a few of them are (arguably) men. And a few more are complete paragons of manliness – these are the bodybuilding jocks who pose for men’s health magazines. Why my girlfriend knows them, I have no idea. But she has a lot of contacts.

I don’t know if it’s something friends just do, but my friends – especially my model friends – love giving me advice. They really, really love it. I always step out of a conversation with a model with a brand new shiny anecdote on how to live life. And they really love gossip. Which is a big part of why I like spending time with them, but not too much time because it does tend to wear one down.

They like to give out fashion advice like candy. But their wardrobe out of work, speaking from experience, doesn’t really change a lot. My girlfriend has a huge wardrobe but she almost never wears those clothes, most of which are complimentary sets from the companies she works for. She tends to wear the clothes once to model them, then keeps the clothes, sends them off to the dry cleaner’s and when they come back, she hides them somewhere in one of her clothes racks and forgets about them completely. It’s actually rather fun to take a walk through that room in her apartment where all her clothes go. I call it the glamor graveyard. She calls it a waste and keeps planning to bunch it all off to some charity somewhere but forgets to all the time.

A lot of people don’t realize that beautiful people are really not much different from regular people. In fact, the ones I know are far more normal than I am. Apart from their terrifying beauty regimes. I’ve stayed over at my girlfriend’s apartment many times, and she tends to have friends crashing over at her place most days of the week. A few of them house – hop because their income isn’t regular enough for them to be able to afford a proper place to stay. Some of them have the money to get their own place, but they just like the freedom. So my girlfriend’s living room is kind of like an open party zone for whoever is over at the time. She doesn’t mind it, because it’s usually relatively quiet and the guests always clean up after themselves and make her breakfast to apologize. And whenever it gets crazy she’s free to go to my house anyway, so it’s all good.

Speaking of the house – hopping models, they may not have a home to go to, but they always carry their beauty regime with them in their duffel bags. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been freaked out by men and women with mud masks and whatnot on their faces as I step into the apartment’s open bathroom (as opposed to the closed one adjoining my girlfriend’s room). It’s miraculous, how they pack that many bottles and boxes into a cloth duffel bag without breaking anything or having stuff leak all over other stuff. And they leave a remarkably small footprint. Living footprint, I mean. It’s hard to believe that dozens of people regularly party in that little living room every other day when you are alone in the room. It’s always immaculate, when there’s nobody around. I’ve seen food and blood (yes, blood) stains on the wall during the party which vanish without a trace the next day after the guest is done bustling about the house cleaning up. Maybe I should introduce them to my mother – stepmother I mean; I’m sure they would enjoy sharing cleaning tips with each other.

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