En Passant: It’s too late for a model life

OUR SISTER newspaper the Ladysmith Gazette had an advert that caught my eye, in its “What’s On” section of last week’s newspaper. At the top there was a picture to illustrate the event, and this picture was of a young woman who could best be described as nubile if not wanton and a latent strumpet. A hussy maybe.

She was half lying on a bed of straw, chewing on the end of a stem of grass, and her midriff was provocatively exposed as were her bare legs. Words set into the photograph said “Strut your stuff”, the meaning of which was not immediately clear to me. As a 66-year-old man one has to be careful where and when one struts one’s stuff, if indeed that’s still possible (and legal).

The heading below the picture was “Camp for models”. Ah! I said, models are known for strutting their stuff up and down catwalks. So the implication in the photograph was not so much that young Doris was looking for a roll in the hay, as she was posing and advertising the benefits of eating grass.

Upon further reading, I learned that there was to be a camp for potential models, held over three days in the Drakensberg (at a five-star location nogal), and that it was open to everybody, and this caught my attention, with NO AGE OR HEIGHT RESTRICTION.

Stone me! I said. This is exactly what I’m after. With my retirement looming I have been thinking how I can keep myself amused and out of mischief, and becoming a model and living the high-life by way of strutting my stuff might be just the thing.

I’ve seen ol’ Doris… ag, man, you know, Naomi Doris… Naomi Campbell, and whatshername, ag, tall chick, Aussie, Elle Macpherson, ja her, I’ve seen them living the life between photo-shoots in Mauritius, I’ve seen them at the Cannes Film Festival, red carpet an’ all, it can’t be that difficult, hey?

I was particularly encouraged by the NO AGE RESTRICTION because it seems to me that the assumption of society (and business) is that once a person has reached 65-plus, they are no longer employable, and that there is no worth, no value, in the decades of experience tucked into their balding crania, or behind their expanded waistlines.

The NO HEIGHT RESTRICTION was also encouraging because although I was once a stately six-feet-and half-an-inch tall, my dodgy back is steadily leaning me over. I might very well still be six-feet-and half-an-inch long if measured from the bottom of my heels and around the curve to the top of my head, but the actual straight-line distance from the top of my head to the ground is somewhat less. You might think this a condition of disadvantage but it does make picking up the soap in the shower easier.

The camp, I was told, would encompass modelling training, focusing on:

* Personal fitness and nutrition. Nutrition? Stone me, the models I’ve seen strutting their stuff look like they’re in dire need of food. Their hipbones look like two dreadnaught battleships coming towards you. I’ve seen storks with thicker legs. Hell, I’VE got thicker legs!

* Etiquette. What’s modelling etiquette? How does it differ from ordinary good manners? Don’t emit wind from any orifice, while on the catwalk? That would be a start I suppose. And how not to laugh until you pee your pants, when some limp-wristed designer wants you to don a garment that looks like it was created by a dagga-smoking dyslexic aardvark.

* Fashion photographic modelling. I’ve seen sessions of fashion photographic modelling, and it seems to me the technique consists primarily of holding you tongue when the flippen photographer keeps saying things like, “Yeah, give me some more of that, baby, let it all hang out, there you go, beautiful, great, wow, yes, more, hold it, oh yes, that’s it, yeah, great…” They could also use this session to teach us to pout, something I have never mastered.

* A day of individual attention on the catwalk. This I understand. This session will be like reinventing the wheel in that everything your parents taught you when you were an infant, and they were urging you to take your first steps, all that goes out the window. Models do not walk like us; they walk like a different species. They have to teach you “The Walk”, and you have to do it with a look of complete and utter boredom on your face, while wearing garments that off the catwalk you wouldn’t be seen dead in.

* Portfolio management. This will be a session to make you believe that a photo album of your modelling pictures is more than a photo album of your modelling pictures.

* Fashion makeup. Listen, I banged “Fashion makeup images” into the Internet and got hundreds of pictures of made-up models, many of which would frighten horses. I suppose there is a skill involved in applying makeup to a model’s face so that she no longer resembles any known female of the species. Yeah, I suppse there is, but I don’t want my Doris to look like that. Ever.

* “Must knows” about the industry. I wonder what those “must knows” are. I don’t really care, I just wonder what you need to know in an industry in which you are, basically, an animated dummy, a dummy like those in the window at Edgar’s.

I dunno. I don’t think I’ll bother.