Xena Versus The Spartans
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If I Told You, Part 2 free porn video
II.
Yes, I did call Tony later that day and we agreed to spread out the next
photo session over two days so that Tony could get several different
layouts for different parts of the ad campaign. Peggy had agreed to let
me have the Thursday and Friday off which meant that I could be at Tony's
earlier in the day. Denise met me and she and I really got down to work.
Shower and shave from my neck to my toes.
"Look's like you could use a laser treatment or at least a body wax,"
Denise mused.
"What are you talking about, Denise?"
"Well, Danny, if you're going to be doing this then you'd better be at
your best and shaving all over every day, ugh! Get laser treatments or at
least a wax job and you won't have to shave nearly so often, with laser -
never!"
"Well, Denise, it seems like such a big step. I mean, I'm still so new at
this."
"I'm sorry, Danny, it's hard for me to believe that you haven't been
doing this for years. You've taken to it like a duck to water."
"I don't know what to say, Denise, I bet you say that to all the girls,"
I joked.
She gave me a playful shove. "Danny, it's a compliment, really. Not only
have you been a good sport about all this, but you've really taken to
this. And I don't mind telling you, the camera loves you. I know that
Tony is over the moon. Of course, he feels sort of weird about the whole
thing. Especially since you and he have been friends. 'What's he doing?
Creating his own Frankenstein's monster?"
"Oh thanks," I said sarcastically, "now you think I'm a monster." I
feigned a pout that was not very successful.
"Oh God, Danny, you'll have to do better than that to get to me."
We both laughed and then Denise got down to business. There I was in
complete female underwear, stockings and high heels with a make-up smock
to cover me. There were mirrors all over the part of the studio that
Denise used so I could see at least part of my face over her shoulder. It
did look incongruous to be sure. My hair was still very much styled, if
you could call it that, in a man's haircut. Tiny diamond earrings dangled
from my lobes far more elaborate and feminine than anything I'd ever
worn. My face was somewhere between a man's and a woman's.
But even with just a partial view I could see there was something else. I
wasn't sure I could put my finger on it, but it was there just the same.
The more I looked the more I realized what it was although at the
beginning I didn't want to acknowledge it. The fact was that I looked,
sat and acted much more like a woman than like a man. And yet I had no
idea where that had come from. Well, that wasn't altogether true. It was
becoming clearer to me, as Denise finished my make up and gave me a hand
mirror to admire the results of her labors, a woman looked back at me and
not a man with a face made up to look like a woman. To someone other than
me the difference was probably pretty small, but to me it was mind-
boggling.
I must have given a little shudder and I realized that although Denise
had started talking to me after she finished, I hadn't heard a word she
said.
"Honey," now it was her turn to look puzzled, "is something the matter?
Did I do something to hurt you?"
I shook my head to clear the cobwebs and mumbled, "Ah, no, Denise, no you
didn't do anything. It's just, well, I don't know, it's just that this
face is going to take a lot of getting used to."
"Well, I'd like to tell you to take your time, but we've got to get
cracking. Here let me help you with that wig."
She took down a wig stand with a much nicer deep auburn wig than the one
I'd word before. Denise proceeded to brush it and generally bring it to
life before securing it to my head and give it the final touch of her
magic.
"Danny, you've got much nicer hair than this wig. I can't wait to see
your hair when you let it grow out. You know you can't be relying on wigs
all the time. When you let your hair grow we can do so many things with
it." She sounded so enthusiastic that I didn't have the heart to tell her
that "doing" my hair was just about the furthest thing from my mind.
Then Denise helped me into the dress. It was a cocktail dress that was
either a vintage dress or a terrific imitation. It was beige silk with a
very subtle jade green leaf and flower design through the fabric, with a
little bolero jacket with three quarter sleeves. The ensemble was
completed with matching pumps and a hat that was basically a fancy series
of wires, covered with the same beige silk and shaped into the outline of
a butterfly. In true retro style it came with a mesh veil that covered
three fourths of my face. The eggshell kid gloves and the vintage diamond
necklace and matching bracelet made the ensemble.
In a few moments Tony was ready for us. Denise followed me over to the
set to see how I would look under the lights. Inevitably I needed a touch
up here and there to meet with her critical approval. The set was a
sidewalk caf?; it could have been Knob Hill in San Francisco, or
Montreal, or even Paris. Across the tiny table a waiter is filling my
glass with the Eagle Crest Vintner's Reserve Cabernet. Sunlight turns the
wine into liquid rubies. A man's hand and sleeve can be seen. The focus
of the piece, however, is the woman (me); we see her shoulder -- the
right one this time --, the side of her face framed by the whisper of a
hat and veil, her gloved hand covers the stem of the impossibly red rose
lying on the table. She doesn't seem to acknowledge the man at the table
or the waiter. Instead, she is gazing in the far distance over the roofs
of the houses.
It did take us every bit of two days to get that right. From the Eagle
Crest people and the general public, the reaction was immediate and very
positive. All over the country people were repeating the slogan "Eagle
Crest vintner's reserve captures the essence of the moment." We knew
that the ad campaign was making its mark when it made it to one of David
Letterman's Top Ten lists and SNL did a take-off on it.
That reaction was not immediate, however. It took about two or three
months after Tony submitted the finished work to the company for their
approval and then to get the ads placed in the right kinds of magazines
and newspapers. This meant, of course, that it was between four and six
months before the ads were everywhere Tony and his client wanted them to
be. Well you can measure success in several ways, I suppose, but by
whatever measure you use Tony's ad campaign for Eagle Crest Vineyards was
an outstanding success. So much so that it was either that series or the
next one of Eagle Crest ads that triggered two things. The first was a
rising chorus of voices, "Who is that woman in the ads?" A couple of the
tabloids even carried bogus articles claiming one or another Hollywood
babe was the 'mystery woman.' The clamor included two or three calls from
some of the best known modeling agencies trying to get that woman under
contract. If all that wasn't bad enough, I was getting more and more
upset about what all this dressing up was doing to me inside my head. I
needed to get into therapy fast!
Some people, I know, are still spooked at the idea of therapy even after
all these years. Happily for me I'm not one of them. Dr. Olga Hansen, M.
D. had a name that sounded very old world, very Freudian. She even sort
of looked the part. OK, call me simple minded, but the first time I saw
her all I could think of was that she was a cross between old Sigmund
himself and Mrs. Olsen in the Folger Coffee commercials. Boy, could looks
be deceiving! Dr. Hansen, yeah I may have called her Olga when I was
talking about her to other people, but I'd never call her that to her
face, was possibly the most open minded person I ever met. I think that
her middle name must have been 'non-judgmental.' What she was doing in
New Springfield I'll never know.
But I'll tell you this right now, I bless the fates that put her there.
Yeah, maybe another therapist would have been just as good or just as
good for me, but I doubt it. Dr. Hansen was exactly the right person in
the right place at the right time for me. I'd gotten her name from Penny,
my boss at the Owl & The Pussycat bookstore where I worked. By the
second session of my therapy with her, I felt that there was nothing
about my life - past or present - that I didn't want Dr. Hansen to know
about. Before I talk about our sessions I've got to get something off my
chest. There is one thing about Dr. Hansen that drives me crazy. (Should
anybody be saying that about their shrink????) That was her professional
reserve. There were times when I'd make some breakthrough or other and
just want to run up and throw my arms around her or conversely to feel
her arms around me. OK, I know what you're going to say about
transferrence and all that. But seriously, how could I not love a person
who knew everything about me that there was to know? I know what you're
saying now, 'get over it.' And I suppose you're right, but I just had to
say it.
The reason that compelled me, that propelled me to see Dr. Hansen was
that this business of wearing dresses was doing serious things inside my
head. My feelings were on a roller coaster and my dreams, whoa! Bizarre
to say the least. The bottom line was that I was afraid. Afraid of what I
might find out about myself, and afraid of what I might not find out
about. I don't know if Dr. Hansen dealt with such things on a day to day
basis, but she certainly made me feel that I was not a candidate for the
loony bin just because I felt that way. Whatever that way was!
For several sessions we talked about just what it was that I did feel
when I put on a dress and how I even felt about having such feelings. I
told her about the feeling of 'resonance,' that sense of 'rightness' when
I got dressed up for the photo sessions. I knew that I had to deal with
these feelings because the winery people were pressuring Tony to use me
for personal appearances on behalf of their product and some commercials
- gleep! I had just about come to grips, or so I thought, with the idea
of wearing a dress for the photo sessions, but the thought of being out
in public dressed that way was out of the question. Or was it?
I know that some people felt that dressing up as I was doing was like an
actor putting on a costume for a part. Some transvestites got some kind
of a kick out of dressing as a woman, whether that kick was sexual or
otherwise. But how did I feel. I certainly didn't feel as if "the moment
I put on the dress my 'inner girl' magically appeared," or did I. Like
any good shrink, Dr. H. began to delve deeper and deeper. Being the kind
of person I am, with a few close friends and no more than one or two
people I would ever confide in, this was very new territory for me. Dr.
H. gently steered me through these uncharted waters. Of course we went
back through my childhood and adolescence, mining them for whatever clues
they might provide.
It would be very tidy and it would make a good story if I told you that
there was some "aha" moment or some epiphany where it all came together
in a blinding flash and I could walk out of Dr. Hansen's office a new
person ready to face all of life's challenges. It would be nice, but it
wouldn't be true. When I agreed to see her, I knew that therapy with Dr.
Hansen wasn't going to be easy and it wasn't going to be quick. I'll come
back to that later in my story, but suffice it to say that I was not
fighting the strangeness of the modeling, nor was I fighting the strange
new feelings. Dr. H and I agreed that I would try to take things as they
came and not draw too many conclusions too soon.
A little bit earlier I mentioned the other thing that had begun to happen
as a result of the stepped-up ad campaign with Tony's photographs of the
'mystery woman' (me). The problem was all the publicity that the ads
generated, and the unwanted attention. You know, attention can be
flattering, but if it's not for the right reason it gets on your nerves
pretty quickly. There were some like the Sunday newspaper insert that
wanted to do a feature story about how the woman in the ads had captured
people's imaginations. Tony was pretty good, no, Tony was excellent at
fending these people off. He managed to do it as if he were an old pro at
it, even though it was as new to him as it was to me. And, even better,
he managed to keep these people away without being a jerk about it; they
left us alone, but they weren't angry about it.
There were also the calls from the modeling agencies. Some were like the
news people, aggressive and not willing to take 'no' for an answer. It
was relatively easy to say no to these folks, and sometimes a little fun,
too. They weren't used to people turning them down; they were used to
turning people down. That meant when we told them that we weren't
interested, they went a little crazy. But agencies like these had other
fish to fry and so they soon left us, that is, they soon left me alone.
There was one exception, however. When Davis-Holland called it was
different. Davis-Holland is one of those agencies, I later learned, with
an impeccable reputation in the fashion and advertising business. When
you heard that some top model was represented by Davis-Holland, you
thought "well, of course." When Tony gave me the message, he indicated
that this one was worth paying attention to. First of all, it was from
Bitsy Holland herself.
Even I had heard of Bitsy Holland. She had been profiled in Newsweek and
The New Yorker among others. Remember, I worked in a bookstore; what made
it into the important magazines was the stuff we talked about over
coffee. Here was a woman with a stupid nickname that even she couldn't
shake, with social connections to die for and an MBA from Harvard
Business School, who used her social connections, to say nothing of the
profits from her agency, to underwrite AIDS research and women's work
cooperatives in India and Bangladesh. She'd used the money she got from
one of those 'genius' grants to start yet another health initiative in
southern Africa. And she was calling me! I went nuts.
I begged Peggy Thomas, my boss at the Owl & The Pussycat, to give me some
motherly, sisterly (whatever!) advice, and quickly! I didn't want to not
return the call from Bitsy Holland. Peggy, who epitomized grace under
pressure, pushed back a strand of her silver gray curls behind her ear
with her long, graceful fingers and looked away into the middle distance
for a moment or two before she answered. I thought as I watched her that
she would make a fantastic model herself. It certainly didn't bother me
that this woman was in her late 50s; she had that lithe beauty that comes
from being a woman totally at peace with herself. If she had been a
dancer or an athlete as a young woman, it wouldn't have surprised me. I'd
always admired the way she held her body. There was nothing self
conscious about the almost languid fluidity of her movements. As she was
contemplating what I needed to do, she reached over to bring the mug of
aromatic tea to her lips. Young actresses should study such gestures, I
thought, smiling to myself. If I ever had a thought about what the word
'regal' meant, I only had to look over at Peggy. Queens could take
lessons from this woman.
"Danny, dear, here's what I think you need to do."
If her voice wasn't so much like the rest of her, strong and yet gentle,
I would have been startled from my reverie.
"You have to decide what you want Ms. Holland to do for you and what you
want to do for her. From everything we know about her, she is the kind of
woman who could help you, her much publicized exploits aside. Now, if
it's some form of modeling you are thinking about, one of the things
you'll have to think about right away is: what are you going to call
yourself? Do you need to change your name legally or is it sufficient to
have a professional name? Time will be an indicator of how far you want
to go with this. And it sounds as if Ms. Holland would be a good person
to advise you. I'd like to make a suggestion, Danny, when you do call her
it probably should be as the woman you portray in Tony's pictures. At
least, for now, give 'Ms. No-name' something that we can call her. Oh,
and by the way your voice is not going to give James Earl Jones a run for
his money. It's manly enough, I suppose, but even I know that you've been
mistaken for a woman on the phone more than once. All you have to do is
stop trying so hard to sound like a man and you'll be fine. You speak
with plenty of animation in your voice as it is. Just take it slowly and
softly and you'll have no trouble, I assure you."
I mulled over what Peggy had said and realized that she was right on all
counts. There might have been a time when her comments about my voice
might have embarrassed me, but therapy had been a big help there. We had
anticipated the 'name thing' in one of my sessions with Dr. Hansen and so
I was not totally unprepared. Since having that earlier conversation with
the good doctor, I'd been turning the idea of a new name over in my mind.
Very quickly I rejected any feminine version of my name. It just didn't
feel right and that was as good a test as any. My own name Danny Lanier
now was out of the question after I gave up on and rearranging of the
letters; no 'Loni Daniel' or any such for me. Something completely
different was needed. My solution was to transform my father's middle
name, Alexander, into Sandi, and my mother's maiden name, Harrison, into
Harris. With that Sandi Harris was born.
Peggy seemed to like the name and that was all the approval I needed.
Legal battles would come in the future. I told Tony that he could tell
only the very selected few, at least for now. Then I took a little walk
around the block to calm the butterflies in my stomach and went into
Peggy's office to call Bitsy Holland. It's unclear to me even now what I
expected, but it certainly not what I got. Instead of some office
rigamarole, a calm, well-modulated voice announced, "This is Bitsy
Holland, may I help you." I identified myself for the first time (ta-
da!) as Sandi Harris and I told Ms. Holland how it was that I happened to
be returning her call.
It's hard to believe, even now, that everything that has transpired since
then had such a modest beginning. I don't think it will surprise you to
learn that Bitsy Holland was friendly and receptive. She was that and a
lot more. When I explained that I had only gotten into sitting for Tony
because he was a friend, she said that I would be surprised how different
women had gotten started as models. She told me that it was her business
to keep her eye out for new modeling talent and that was what had caused
her to pay attention to me. I asked her how she could tell just from two
different photographs.
"Well, Sandi, I can't be certain till I know more about you, but my
instincts are pretty good. If they weren't I wouldn't last long in this
business. I can tell by the way you hold your body and the way the
clothes look on you that you've got great potential. Of course, I want to
meet you and get to know you; that's essential."
Maybe it was my nerves, but I couldn't believe my own ears as I heard
myself ask her, "How do I know that this is not some come-on and you're
not just some swindler trying to gyp a poor girl out of her life
savings?"
I hoped she heard the joking tone in my voice. I needn't have worried.
You don't often hear a woman belly laugh, but that's exactly what she
did. It took her a moment.
"Thank you, Sandi, you got me there. It's been a crazy day here and you
gave me a good laugh. But listen, dear, if you or, let's say, your mother
is worried, I'd be happy to supply the names of some references."
"No thanks, Ms. Holland, that won't be necessary."
"Sandi, please call me Bitsy. You've probably heard that I hated the
nickname, but it stuck and I'm used to it. More importantly, were all on
a first name basis here. In our case all of us who work at Davis-Holland
like it that way. It really does feel like a family. Listen, Sandi, why
don't you think things over and call me tomorrow and we'll arrange a time
when you can come here and meet everybody. Of course we'll fly you here
and put you up at a nice place while you're here in New York. Toni, our
travel genius, will work out all the details with you. Don't worry about
a thing. And, oh, Sandi, would you give my best to Peggy; we haven't
talked in ages. Good bye, dear, I'll talk to you tomorrow."
I put down the phone and I was thunderstruck. Peggy never mentioned that
she knew Bitsy Holland. It turns out the three of them, my Mother, Peggy
and Bitsy had been room mates as undergraduates at Northwestern. A person
might be forgiven for thinking that would be an interesting bit of
information to know. When I told Peggy about the phone call I mentioned
that she might have told me, etc., etc. She said that she didn't want her
friendship with Bitsy to influence me in any way. I suppose I could
understand her point of view, but I realized that as much as I admired
her, I still had underestimated Peggy. Just who else did she know??
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