The agency just called.
“You got a short, white tennis skirt and lots of champagne in your future,” Renee said. As the agency’s head booker, she loves coming up with dramatic lines when I land an assignment.
The “Evian” marketing team liked me; I’ll be their VIP “hostess” for the beginning, and end, of the U.S. Open. Is “hostessing” an actual job, you ask? In New York City it is…especially when you’re 25, vaguely attractive, poor and at work on your first novel. I see it this way: a tennis skirt and an “Evian. Live Young” tank top in the cool comfort of a Flushing Meadows VIP room is much more agreeable than juggling plates and bickering over the tip pool at some Midtown, one-star restaurant.
The egos, however, are going to get me. How goes the F. Scott Fitz quote? “The rich, they’re not like you and me.” The same can be said for the men that inhabit VIP rooms. The laminated cards, wrist bands and free-flowing alcohol give them the bravado and swagger normally reserved for rock stars. Add to the mix my scanty attire and subservient position and, in their minds, I’ve become a veritable groupie.
One errant hard-on and I’m out of there.
I’m not goddamn Penny Lane.
I am a Southerner in the City, an aging debutante, a small town girl cursed with big city aspirations. My grandfather says that I’m at the cusp of feminine failure—I’m as old as a bottle of prime Tennessee whiskey (aged 25 years) and still single. I need to “get on home” and find a nice Southern boy—a doctor, maybe an insurance salesman. At this, I dig in my heels and set out to date every inappropriate man in Manhattan…
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