Eating Cake with a Future Supermodel

      Last Summer I made friends with a lovely young girl--Riss!--who was just beginning to carve out the beginnings of a modeling career for herself. I found myself at her send-off party just before a national pageant. Go Riss.
      The room was packed with former schoolteachers, fellow models, friends, and family. Mostly family. Riss modeled some dresses for us from a corner of the conference room that had been decked out with red carpet and a camera tripod. I learned what a $10,000 dress looks like. It was interesting to experience that while wearing a button-down shirt from the thrift store. Being untucked, it covered the bit of rope I'd used to improvise a belt. Back then I looked more or less like an unmade bed everywhere I went.
      I hovered around the edges of the whole gathering, taking notes, talking to strangers. The idea was to write a memory piece for the family to keep. The party marked an important moment for Riss. She had one foot in rural Maine, the other in L.A. or N.Y.C. or wherever opportune winds might blow her. At her incredibly young age, Riss was tackling an intensely judgmental and selective career, where the barrier to entry is high.
      Suddenly the photographer shouted "Get your picture taken on the red carpet!" and Riss stood waiting with her cocktail dress, measured pose, the incredibly consistent smile. I laughed with a few of the men in her extended family and her mother and scratched notes about the line that formed next to the photographer's tripod: little girls and boys, an uncle, a pair I assume were Riss's grandparents. The line formed loosely, then gradually dissolved as the gang shuffled forward to meet the lens and the flash. Hard-working Mainers, all. I felt right at home.
      Until an arm slipped between my elbow and body, seized me by the wrist, and started dragging me forward through the crowd. It was Diane, a dress shop owner from the town I lived in at the time. Her shop neighbored the cafe that I managed. Diane's a wonderful woman.
      But at that moment she was my jailor, dragging me toward the blood-red carpet with startling strength. Already in motion toward the expensive cameras and dresses, with no hope of escaping, I had to scan my surroundings on the fly for a spot of open table surface to drop my notebook.
      "Oh my God," said Katie, then Miss Maine, as she saw me coming. I'd served her coffee before. I think I fell while I served her. Buster Keaton-style.
      "Remember me?" I asked.
      She laughed. "Yes."
      And then I was pushed out onto the carpet between Riss and Katie. Diane stepped over to the other side of Rissa and there we stood, smiling in a row. Am I the only one without a sash? Where's mine?
      "Hi!" Riss said.
      "Hi," I said. I wanted to ask whether her cheekbones hurt from smiling for the past full hour, but I didn't have time.
      "Look this way!" Cried the photographer. I shut my mouth and awkwardly obeyed his three or four commands like a dog that hasn't quite learned the difference between "sit" and "roll over" yet. I am not a natural.
      Flash.
      "Take one of Norissa and Nick together!" said Diane. She and Katie abandoned us on the carpet. Uh-oh. Six dozen family members staring and sizing up the scruffy longhair standing next to their Riss. No, no, that's fine. Really. Just shoot me.
And so the photographer, Akers, did. "Don't puff out!" he said from behind the tripod. Now when I look at the photo I see what he meant. I wasn't conscious of it at the time, but I was pushing my chest out so I look like one of those lizards that inflates to make itself look scary when it's threatened.
      Flash.
      "Don't move yet!"
      Diane steps toward us again, puts one hand on Norissa's leg and one hand on mine, and presses our sides together. Laughter in the room. Oh come on!
      Shoot me again, sir, please. The first wasn't quite fatal.
      Flash.
      Riss's mom--Cynthia--from the back of the room: "Now tilt your heads toward each other juuuuust a little." The room roars.
Riss's hands go up and she laces her smile with a mock-angry scowl. "All right!" she says, thrusting her palms out. Akers, mother, and Diane relent, and we slink away.
It's time to cut the cake, which has a black shoe made of spun sugar on top. "I might have seconds," jokes Riss's dad while waiting for his first piece. The family is clearly celebrating. The clock spins.
      Then, finally, a chain reaction of goodbyes. The room thins, then empties. About ten of us remain. We pull a few tables together and sit. The pageant looms. It feels like we're eating cake on the edge of the world. I wonder how Norissa's feeling, and look around. I turn just in time to catch a purple streak as Riss tackles her sister with a crazy hug that threatens to take them both down. Her hairpiece goes awry.
      "I love you!" She yells into her sister’s shoulder.
      "It's neat that you're here," Cynthia says as we sit. "You know, because sometimes people meet by chance in life and wonder what it would have been like to know one another. And here you both are."
      I don't remember how I responded. Norissa was seventeen then. I was twenty-five. I still don't understand what made Cynthia and Diane want to marry us, or what Norissa made of all that silliness.
      But I'm grateful that I was invited. The cake was great, the family welcoming. What a blast.
      Now that I think about it, that same bit of rope that held my pants up at a party for future supermodels now holds my beaten-up copper guitar together. But that's a story for another day.