Paris: The Memoir(60)
That videotape never crossed my mind.
Why would it?
There was no YouTube back then, no way for a regular person to upload something like that onto the internet. The technology for humiliating someone on that level hadn’t been invented yet.
On New Year’s Eve 2000, I celebrated with a trip to Vegas, where I went into an exotic pet store and came out two hours later with several small animals including two ferrets and a baby goat. When I got to the airport with all these pet crates and supplies, the gate agent told me, “This is not a traveling zoo.” I had to rent a limo and travel through ten hours of New Year’s Eve traffic back to LA by myself with my new animal friends crapping all over the seats. I spent the first few hours of 2001 drinking champagne and helping the driver clean it all up.
Thus, the aughts were defined as the decade of extra.
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I loved the early 2000s party vibe even more than the late 1990s; you were encouraged to be out there and be extra. What Not to Wear wasn’t until 2003, and Fashion Police didn’t come into play until 2010, after Twitter had gotten a choke hold on everyone’s ability to think for themselves. I don’t know why there’s never been a show celebrating style that’s unique and fully individual, but you know what? You don’t need permission to be an icon.
Madonna’s tulle skirts with biker boots.
Sarah Jessica Parker’s circle skirts and fascinators.
Gaga’s elevator boots and meat dress.
Somebody had to do it first, right? It doesn’t matter if the people around you don’t get it right now; one beautiful thing about the internet is that the moment lives on for all time. Bj?rk’s Marjan Pejoski swan dress at the Oscars got laughed at in 2001. Now it’s iconic.
The reverse is true, too, of course. The bad moments also live on and probably get more retweets. But the takeaway is, wear what makes you feel good. When I share looks, ideas, and products as an influencer, my goal is not to teach you how to please other people; I’m encouraging you to please yourself. Even if the particular look doesn’t stand the test of time, the memory of that good feeling will. And who knows? The look might experience a moment when the time is right. Papa used to say, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” Style goes around and comes around: Spirograph, not Etch-a-Sketch.
I moved into a huge house with two other girls—Playboy bunnies Jennifer Rovero and Nicole Lenz—who were always ready to party and had standing invitations to anything happening at the Playboy Mansion. We each had our own floor with big bedrooms, bathrooms, and spacious walk-in closets. The mid-mod wallpaper and furnishings—boomerang coffee tables, papasan chairs, and glass bricks—reminded me of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. We called the landlord Mr. Furley because he reminded us of the vaguely creepy old landlord played by Don Knotts on Three’s Company.
The neighborhood was quiet and full of flowers, a perfect home base for me. You don’t find a house like that in LA for the money we could afford, so at first, we couldn’t believe our luck. We were like, “Oh, my god! How are we renting this giant house for so little money?” Then we realized Mr. Furley wasn’t moving out. We moved in, and he stayed in his room on the top floor. That was the catch. He swore he wasn’t spying on us, and we never saw any signs of it, but we figured he could easily have had peepholes.
But it was a really, really great house!
Obviously, I wouldn’t accept this as okay for any nineteen-year-old girl now, but Jen and Nicole were a couple years older than me, completely comfortable in their own skin. They had a lot of experience handling all kinds of iffy situations. They didn’t love Mr. Furley haunting the place, but it wasn’t a deal breaker either. We figured we could keep an eye on Mr. Furley, and as long as he didn’t try anything, it was worth letting him feel like he was Hugh Hefner’s Mini-Me living in a house with a bunch of beautiful girls. And he never tried anything.
To be honest, I didn’t really care. It’s sad, but I was basically desensitized about being seen naked. I’d love to say this was because I was empowered with free and full ownership of my body, but the truth is, modesty is one more thing I’d been robbed of. Modesty was a luxury I learned to do without. How else would anyone be able to stand that invasive shower observation day after day? Some girls slowly died inside. Not me. I just became numb to it. After a while the gross comments just bounced off the wall. When they stared at me with their greasy little eyeballs, I stared back, thinking, “Eat your heart out, fuckface.”
Creepy behavior is about the creeper, not the person being creeped on.
The mind has powerful coping mechanisms; almost anything can be normalized or compartmentalized if the alternative is to go crazy. I’m not saying it’s great, but it made me stronger and forced me to get over myself in terms of how other people think about me. After going through that, I was tough enough to withstand anything internet haters dish out. You can’t internalize the hate and judgment and degenerate Twit-spew. It’s a poisonous wild berry cooler of crap that paralyzes you and gives the anonymous all the power.
These days I really do feel empowered by free and full ownership of my body, but that’s something I grew into. It took me years to understand that I’m a performance artist, and my body is my medium—like a blank canvas or an empty stage—and I’ll never create anything meaningful if I come to the work from a place of shame and cowardice. It’s not about how much skin you show; it’s about who owns the moment.