Lemondrop

A few posts ago, I wrote about my warrior-princess-esque skills in the battle for control of the fashion-shoot stereo, and the hideous, Mariah-intensive consequences of allowing a photographer to DJ.

It's a hard-learned lesson. At my first job in Shanghai, I broke my own rules, and oh, God, did I suffer. Nearly died!

I was having my makeup done, iPod on, when the client approached and tapped me on the shoulder.

"What kind of music you like?"

"Oh," I cooed, smiling sweetly. "Pretty much anything! Something with a good beat, I guess."

I imagined that this might be my first step in a glorious metamorphosis from a sourpussed Maroon 5-hating bitch into someone affable and good-natured.

"OK," responded the client. "Something full of beat. You like the Maroon 5?"

Click here to read the rest of Elyse's adventures in modeling.

Abandoning the affability plan immediately, because no self-improvement scheme is viable if one is dead from a massive, Maroon 5-induced cerebral hemorrhage, I replied "NO!"

"Any particular group?"

I should have drawn upon my mental list of the listenable lowest-common-denominator discs that are stacked in all fashion studios, but no. Voice honeyed with desire to kiss client ass, I trilled, "Nope!"

In true mainland China style, the client went outside to the nearest pirated-CD stall (in China you're never more than 50 feet from one) and bought new CDs for us to listen to on the job. His choices? "All Rise," by English boy band Blue; "The Best Damn Thing," by Avril Lavigne (mysteriously huge in China); and "Hybrid Theory," by Linkin Park.

Ugh! My choice would have been the boy band (at least some tracks might be "full of beats"), but the client deepened his campaign for stereo domination by perching on a stool next to the CD player, cuing up the Park.

As I strode in front of the photographer's lens, clad in a lurid printed-silk dress, poised to make my first pose, he screamed, "OK, FEEL THIS FEELING! LISTEN TO THE WORDS!"

My body is usually slathered with preposterous amounts of makeup, draped in hideous clothes, prodded like an animal's, stripped and draped again like a doll's. I will pose, all right. I will arrange my face into a vast array of very convincingly "sincere" expressions. I will jump in the air for every shot for six, eight hours (in heels!). I will happily bare my ass.

But to ask me to lay bare my soul in the service of acid-green rabbit-fur chubbies and garishly bedazzled high-water Mom jeans, to be, emotionally invested in 50 different sets of purple satin jodhpurs and floral rayon blazers is asking too much!

I am an emotional sovereign and I refuse to feel what Linkin' Park is feeling!