I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(59)

The Joy of Quitting


I love to make people laugh.

And I love approval.

So to get the approval of being selected as an official laugh-maker by a magazine that presides over grocery store checkout lanes and pedicure chairs across the country felt like a big deal. A funny writer-friend of mine brought me on board at Us Weekly and explained how it works: The editors send us, the writers, a file of celebrity photos every Tuesday. On Wednesday, we each email back a list of jokes to go with each photo. The next week, a few captions for each image are chosen to run in the magazine’s Fashion Police spread.

Analyzing fashion is great fun. Take gladiator sandals, for instance. They make your calves looked like pork tenderloin trussed with twine, so how did they get to be so popular? What message is a woman conveying when she wears them? I love the feel of air on my toes and also want people to know I’m tough enough to stab a lion or errant Roman with a sword in front of a roaring crowd? I guess.

I figured the Us Weekly job would be right up my alley.



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I didn’t exactly knock it out of the park at the start. To me, a deadpan, literal description of a garment is funny, but apparently that’s not the style Us Weekly is looking to serve up to its consumers.

“Rihanna emerges from limousine, nipples mashed to two-dimensional discs by translucent bandeau compression-top.” They didn’t run that.

“Hair whipped into anti-gravitational balloon, Adele orders tea from behind fruit-platter-size sunglasses.” Not that one either.

Knowing that we wouldn’t be penalized for jokes that didn’t make the cut, sometimes I sent in rambling captions like this one, on a starlet in a python-and-lace tube dress: “She looks like a very fancy snake going to a wedding where all the other snakes are like, ‘Daaaaamn, girl, dontchoo know better than to upstage the snake-bride?’ but she’s like ‘Bitch, please, I do what I want.’?”

They did not run that.

I tried studying the jokes that did make the cut each week. I knew some of the other writers. They were wildly talented, but the captions running under their names weren’t as funny as their other writing. It seemed the magazine was deliberately choosing the most bland, punny lines. So I tried toning down the weird, softening my humor a bit.

A shredded cape: “The fringed poncho. Froncho, if you will.”

A long blazer over apparently no pants at all: “Suit yourself. Or, you know, half-suit yourself. Whatever.”

A demure skirt suit with black leather hand wear: “It’s all fun and crumpets until someone puts on OJ gloves.”

Tiny red hot pants: “Ruby slippers take you home; ruby knickers take you everywhere.”

A floral gown: “My grandmother had those curtains.” That’s not even a joke. It’s just a statement. It ran.

Eventually, I got the hang of it and got at least a few “jokes” in every issue. I wanted them to come with a disclaimer: I can be better than this. But I was on a roll.

I think the only caption they ever ran that I felt really proud of was for Jane Fonda, who in her late seventies had no qualms about showing up on a red carpet in a skintight sequined green bodysuit. “The Green Lantern’s mom is looking hot,” I quipped. She did look hot. And she looked like the Green Lantern’s mom.



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I didn’t like the jokes I was making to gain acceptance, but there was something else that bothered me even more. The role I put myself in to do this job made me uncomfortable. There’s a difference between poking fun at professional ads or photos from a fashion runway and taking aim at what real people are wearing. No matter how funny or not-funny my captions were, this job, at its core, was poking fun at people.

Sure, some of our subjects were standing on red carpets, posing for cameras, inviting the public gaze. You could say they were asking for it. But how many of them were doing it because they really loved dressing up and posing for public consumption? How many were doing it because it was a necessary part of the job—promoting a movie or an album or receiving an award—and they couldn’t let people down by saying no, or they were afraid they’d lose out on much-needed publicity for a project if they abstained? How many were dressed by a crazy stylist who said, “Trust me, this yellow vinyl bustier is a great idea,” as a manager stood by and said, “It’s fabulous, so fabulous.”

And that’s not even including the people who weren’t on red carpets at all—whose pictures were snapped as they walked, heads down, through airports and in and out of gyms and coffee shops, going about their lives at the end of a paparazzo’s long-range lens.

I wanted to look away, to give them a little space.

You could say, well, they’re so famous, they shouldn’t complain. You see that line of reasoning all the time: “You’re the one who decided to go into show business.” You asked for it, people imply. It comes with the package.

No, they didn’t ask for that. Not all of them. Some of them just wanted to act—or to sing or to write—not to have a guy with a camera popping out from behind trash cans as they walk down the street. I thought about all the articles and tweets I’d read by celebrities begging the paparazzi to respect their family’s privacy, all the interviews in which they described the relentless way the photogs dogged them, pouncing as soon as they exited a hotel or restaurant, following too closely in traffic, trotting along five steps behind on the sidewalk.