Three Girls and their Brother. Theresa Rebeck
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is mostly sort of brainy and above it all, when he’s not falling for stupid but gorgeous women.
So Polly’s delirious, Mom is purring, Queen Daria is too cool to react, which is her way of pursuing her bliss, and Amelia just keeps looking at the floor, wishing it were over. All the hair and makeup people have to ask her about twelve zillion times to hold her head up. Then they start telling her how gorgeous she is—well, everyone’s telling each other that, and it’s hardly news, it’s more like white noise in this place—and then they start telling her to smile. It was really kind of frightening, to tell the truth, and in addition you could see it was more or less making her head split. I finally slid over sort of to one side of her, she’s drowning in gay men who are picking at everything, her hair of course, face, toenails; she was really just surrounded. So I sort of stood there like a fool and yelled, “Hey, Amelia, you look gooorrrrrgeouuuuus!” She looked around, just like suddenly mad as hell, and I thought, oh shit, she doesn’t get it, and then she did, and she grinned and rolled her eyes at me. She really does hate all that stuff.
I of course am totally not supposed to be there. I’m just the idiot brother, only nobody of course knows even that much, because nobody introduces anybody around here. I swear, I don’t know why anybody bothers teaching their kids manners; you go out into the world and expect people to say things like, “Hello, my name is Stu, what’s yours?” Or even, “Hi, I’m the makeup guy, who are you?” But not one of these people does anything remotely like this; they are all too hip to introduce themselves to anyone, or take notice of some pathetic teenager hanging out in the corner because his sister has been abducted by the New Yorker. So everyone just keeps flicking their eyes over me like I’m just some total loser who snuck in without a hall pass and as soon as security shows up I’ll get tossed. I’m standing around doing nothing, so obviously the only reason I would be there is because I’m desperate to be a part of this devastating scene, which means that my loserdom can provide everyone with an opportunity to be even more hip, because then they can strut around and prove to themselves that they’re above saying hello to losers like me.
For all the frenzy, nothing really happens for the longest time. I swear, hours they’re working on the girls and running around and yelling at each other about lip gloss. The head stylist, who is bossing everybody around and making all the decisions, is some guy named Stu. Stu apparently has been hired by Herb, who doesn’t want to have to be bothered with all the decisions about what the models are going to wear and how to do their hair up, so he brings in Stu, who arranges everything and then Herb can just show up and take the pictures. Actually, it might be the New Yorker that hires Stu to do all this. I can’t remember. The point is, Stu is flying around like the queen bee he is, surrounded by flocks of minions who wait breathlessly while he decides who’s going to wear what, what color toenail polish goes on which girl, and what to do with all that red hair. And then everybody tells him why that won’t work, he screams, then changes his mind anyway, and it goes on like that for hours.
Which obviously takes a lot of concentration. There are maybe six thousand decisions to change your mind about. Do they all wear the same basic outfit, maybe three micro-minis in different colors, playing up the sister act? Micro-minis are so five minutes ago, maybe we should accentuate the classical allure of their beauty and just put them in evening gowns. Or do you put all three of them in get-ups which are all stylistically different, accentuating their separate personalities? Stu ends up going with a version of this last plan. There is great general relief at this point, and no one bothers to point out that Stu actually doesn’t know what the differences in my sisters’ personalities are, as he has just met them that morning. This is clearly going to be considered entirely irrelevant to the concept.
But Stu has moved on from evening gowns, and he’s living in a fantasy of three gorgeous girls with gorgeous red hair, all of them different, completely “about” different things, awaken ing male desires in three completely different ways. Daria is going to be the picture of elegance, the princess every boy yearns to marry, Audrey Hepburn at the ball; I swear the words “Audrey Hepburn” actually came out of Stu’s mouth and Daria got a real glint in her eye. I thought Polly was going to strangle her. But then Stu starts in on Polly and her raw sexuality, compares her to Christina Aguilera, which, let’s face it, isn’t as good as Audrey Hepburn, but Polly knows enough to play it cool and sure enough it gets better. Stu starts going on about Naomi Campbell and how she supposedly has the best body in the business but Polly’s is better, plus she exudes sex like all the supermodel greats—I swear, the words “supermodel greats” also came out of his mouth—and then he runs off a whole string of names which I had never heard of but she sure had. And then old Stu starts in on Amelia, and how she’s this androgynous girl-boy figure, a wood nymph, the mysteries of nature and earth and mind, Shakespearean heroines, I kid you not, Stu was an impressive bullshit artist. Anyway, it all amounts to the fact that Amelia gets to wear blue jeans. Which is such a relief for her that she actually gives herself permission to enjoy the whole mess for five or ten minutes, and for that brief period of time no one has to tell her to smile.
The announcement that Amelia will be wearing blue jeans turns the tension down a point in general, as Polly and Daria seemed to dig the fact as well. Polly even had a sort of vague, sisterly moment where she told Amelia that that would look cool, blue jeans are so sexy. It was so warm and gooey it was not hard to figure out what was going on. The fact is, you put three sisters in a room and say, well, now everyone is going to see how pretty we can make you all look? And then keep at it for hours, with everyone screaming about how beautiful one thing or another is, eyes lips hair, hair hair hair; well, sooner or later the question of who is the most beautiful is going to rear its ugly head. As you may know, there’s a whole Greek myth about this kind of situation; it supposedly started the Trojan War. Anyway, the point is, all three of my sisters are very beautiful; my mother’s genes were ruthlessly efficient in this area. But Amelia got one thing from my dad the Jew that nobody else got: Her hair curls. In big, red-gold ringlets.
Which, as you can imagine, got their share of attention from the attention hounds. You should have heard them, in the middle of all that bullshit, there was this endless sort of dumb repetition, over and over, “And god, look at this one, it curls. Not only did she get the color, it curls. Fucking amazing … Did you see the curls? Christ. And there’s a fucking lot of it. What a head of hair. And it curls …” So you can’t blame Daria and Polly for getting a little worried; I was worried and what do I know? I’ll tell you what I know: Amelia’s only fourteen, Polly and Daria are seventeen and eighteen; it would be horrible beyond words for her to walk away with the shot. She’s fourteen—put her in blue jeans, don’t tempt fate.
So that’s why we were all so relieved, for the moment. And once the blue-jeans decision was made, we moved onto the shades-of-green discussion. Different girls, different styles, red hair: The unifying element would naturally be shades of green.In which, as you might expect, my sisters all tend to look rather devastating. Any shade of green pretty much works. In spite of which Stu whips himself into a frenzy; none of the greens go together and some of them are olive and dowdy and these are beautiful girls: What idiot would put girls who look like this in olive? Which got the clothes stylist kind of defensive and she started to argue about what’s in this season and Donna Karan’s fall line and Stu sneers abo ut camouflage chic, and drops several pieces on the floor, which makes her even madder, and that goes on for another couple of hours.
There was one person in the middle of all this nonsense who resembled a human being. This is the hair stylist, who actually is so concentrated on what she’s doing that she doesn’t yell at anyone, ever, which made me think for the longest time that she was just somebody’s assistant. Then at one point I slid over to see what she was cooking up for Amelia and all those damn curls and she looked at me and said, “Hey, who are you?” Which just about knocked me over; it was the most interest anyone expressed in me all day.
I was so surprised that anyone had spoken to me that it took me a minute to respond, so Amelia said, “This is my brother, Philip,” and the hair stylist grinned and said, “This exciting for you, to see your sisters doing a big photo shoot like this?” And again I was so stunned by anyone expressing interest in what I thought that I sort of mumbled and said, “I don’t know.” But this hair stylist didn’t