dress for success
SK and I went to the Laurelhurst last night and saw The Devil Wears Prada. The Laurelhurst is one of several brew-and-view theatres here in Portland that show second-run movies pretty cheap and make their money off beer and food, mostly pizza. I can't imagine spending ten bucks on a new release at a regular theatre, but three bucks to see something a month or so later is fine by me.
I was really surprised to find myself totally engaged in this movie. I expected it to be funny, but I didn't hope much higher. And sure, it's a hollywood movie and the "dramatic" arc is still exactly the shape tradition dictates, but I was surprised by how authentic the characters felt and, more than anything, how familiar her shitty job seemed. I never, ever had it so bad, but I got a tiny taste of it when I worked in publishing several years ago and I ended up scurrying back to social services where I belonged after only ten months.
Of course, when I describe my experience, you'll think I'm ridiculous for even beginning to compare the two. I worked for a small, literary publishing house in the South, which was owned by a huge behemoth in New York, famous for it's page-a-day calendars. My supervisor was actually a nice guy in the marketing department and I was trained by the woman I was replacing, who'd been promoted to publicity. She was gorgeous and doe-eyed, much like the Anne Hathaway who stars in Devil Wears Prada. The big boss, however, and the woman I lived in terror of, was Shannon Ravenel, the editor-in-chief of the publishing house and also its co-founder.
She was larger than life, Southern aristocracy, aging gorgeously like a piece of Greek art, poised, mannered, extremely intelligent, stylish, and a kind of hidden treasure, a literary legend hiding out in a small mill-house office in Carrborro, NC, publishing eight books a season and presiding over a staff of ten, including me, the office gopher and mail girl.
My official title was "publishing assistant," which indicated only that I was to assist everybody in every department whenever called upon to further the general goal of publishing books. Mostly I sat in my little copy room sorting mail and doing my few mail related tasks, anxiously awaiting the barrage of assignments from different departments that would always come all at once and usually involved doing things that seemed completely impossible.
My assignments often came from Craig, my actual supervisor. He would bring me some old, beat-up piece of newsprint featuring an article about some ancient baseball player from 1932 whose biography we happened to be publishing and ask me to make a "clean copy" of it for him to present at a marketing meeting. I would spend the next several hours doing ad-hoc art restoration with the copier and a jar of white out, blowing the thing up as big as I could and delicately painting out all the blemishes and smears, then blowing it back down to size and hoping for the best. This was before the days of scanners and photo-shop, or at least before those things were so commonplace.
I actually kind of enjoyed those jobs. The jobs that struck terror into my heart were the jobs assigned by Shannon herself. She would leave yellow post-its stuck to my table (it wasn't a desk really) with tersely written assignments that I would uncode and try to perform. She also used these yellow post-its to tell me when I'd screwed something up. I lived in abject terror of those post-its and worry all the way to work each morning about finding one when I walked in.
All this is really dramatic. Shannon was no Miranda Priestly. Shannon was extremely polite and quite generous. When I left, she made clear that if I ever needed a letter of recommendation, she would be happy to provide. In publishing, that's quite a big deal, however, outside publishing, I'm afraid nobody knows who she is, regardless of the fact that she's otherwise famous and has her own imprint now. No, I was not afraid of her because she was mean and scary, I was afraid of her because she was so smart and so successful and so gorgeous in her accomplishment, it was like she shone with a blinding light and looking at her was like looking at the sun. I was afraid of her because she was the most magnificent person I could imagine, and I just wanted her to like me and recognize in me some talent as demonstrated by my efficient accomplishment of all my meager office tasks.
Truthfully, I had nothing to show for myself in life yet besides a college degree from a not particularly well-regarded school and a pretty good car I'd just bought (and am still driving these nine years later, thank you very much). Besides which, I was all the things Shannon was not: I was an awkward, badly dressed, tom-boy trying desperately to pull off some gender neutral version of office casual and failing, totally failing. I was uncomfortable about my presentation (my short hair always in-between growing out and keeping cropped, never looking quite right, my clunky shoes before clunky shoes were good) and that made me uncomfortable about everything else. I watched that movie last night and was sad to sympathize so much with the fashion issue, of all things. I wonder what might have happened if I'd been able to make a similar transformation: if I'd suddenly found confidence in good clothes. Would I have suddenly hit my stride, like Andy in the movie? Would I have stepped up and delivered and earned the respect of the woman in the office I wanted so badly to please?
I don't know. Maybe. But I think I would've fallen off the radar eventually in a similar fashion. I wasn't smart enough or well-read enough to move into any kind of editorial position and I would've had to keep slogging away downstairs in publicity or marketing, at least until I'd managed to come up to speed. And even then, to be pulled into editorial would've been such an enormous leap, it may never, ever have happened. And I hated the marketing and publicity aspect of publishing, it was awful. No, I would've left publishing no matter what transformation had occurred. It had no heart in it. I love books and words too much to be in the business of selling them. But funny to notice the kind of nostalgia for publishing that movie aroused. It was good. You should see it.
I was really surprised to find myself totally engaged in this movie. I expected it to be funny, but I didn't hope much higher. And sure, it's a hollywood movie and the "dramatic" arc is still exactly the shape tradition dictates, but I was surprised by how authentic the characters felt and, more than anything, how familiar her shitty job seemed. I never, ever had it so bad, but I got a tiny taste of it when I worked in publishing several years ago and I ended up scurrying back to social services where I belonged after only ten months.
Of course, when I describe my experience, you'll think I'm ridiculous for even beginning to compare the two. I worked for a small, literary publishing house in the South, which was owned by a huge behemoth in New York, famous for it's page-a-day calendars. My supervisor was actually a nice guy in the marketing department and I was trained by the woman I was replacing, who'd been promoted to publicity. She was gorgeous and doe-eyed, much like the Anne Hathaway who stars in Devil Wears Prada. The big boss, however, and the woman I lived in terror of, was Shannon Ravenel, the editor-in-chief of the publishing house and also its co-founder.
She was larger than life, Southern aristocracy, aging gorgeously like a piece of Greek art, poised, mannered, extremely intelligent, stylish, and a kind of hidden treasure, a literary legend hiding out in a small mill-house office in Carrborro, NC, publishing eight books a season and presiding over a staff of ten, including me, the office gopher and mail girl.
My official title was "publishing assistant," which indicated only that I was to assist everybody in every department whenever called upon to further the general goal of publishing books. Mostly I sat in my little copy room sorting mail and doing my few mail related tasks, anxiously awaiting the barrage of assignments from different departments that would always come all at once and usually involved doing things that seemed completely impossible.
My assignments often came from Craig, my actual supervisor. He would bring me some old, beat-up piece of newsprint featuring an article about some ancient baseball player from 1932 whose biography we happened to be publishing and ask me to make a "clean copy" of it for him to present at a marketing meeting. I would spend the next several hours doing ad-hoc art restoration with the copier and a jar of white out, blowing the thing up as big as I could and delicately painting out all the blemishes and smears, then blowing it back down to size and hoping for the best. This was before the days of scanners and photo-shop, or at least before those things were so commonplace.
I actually kind of enjoyed those jobs. The jobs that struck terror into my heart were the jobs assigned by Shannon herself. She would leave yellow post-its stuck to my table (it wasn't a desk really) with tersely written assignments that I would uncode and try to perform. She also used these yellow post-its to tell me when I'd screwed something up. I lived in abject terror of those post-its and worry all the way to work each morning about finding one when I walked in.
All this is really dramatic. Shannon was no Miranda Priestly. Shannon was extremely polite and quite generous. When I left, she made clear that if I ever needed a letter of recommendation, she would be happy to provide. In publishing, that's quite a big deal, however, outside publishing, I'm afraid nobody knows who she is, regardless of the fact that she's otherwise famous and has her own imprint now. No, I was not afraid of her because she was mean and scary, I was afraid of her because she was so smart and so successful and so gorgeous in her accomplishment, it was like she shone with a blinding light and looking at her was like looking at the sun. I was afraid of her because she was the most magnificent person I could imagine, and I just wanted her to like me and recognize in me some talent as demonstrated by my efficient accomplishment of all my meager office tasks.
Truthfully, I had nothing to show for myself in life yet besides a college degree from a not particularly well-regarded school and a pretty good car I'd just bought (and am still driving these nine years later, thank you very much). Besides which, I was all the things Shannon was not: I was an awkward, badly dressed, tom-boy trying desperately to pull off some gender neutral version of office casual and failing, totally failing. I was uncomfortable about my presentation (my short hair always in-between growing out and keeping cropped, never looking quite right, my clunky shoes before clunky shoes were good) and that made me uncomfortable about everything else. I watched that movie last night and was sad to sympathize so much with the fashion issue, of all things. I wonder what might have happened if I'd been able to make a similar transformation: if I'd suddenly found confidence in good clothes. Would I have suddenly hit my stride, like Andy in the movie? Would I have stepped up and delivered and earned the respect of the woman in the office I wanted so badly to please?
I don't know. Maybe. But I think I would've fallen off the radar eventually in a similar fashion. I wasn't smart enough or well-read enough to move into any kind of editorial position and I would've had to keep slogging away downstairs in publicity or marketing, at least until I'd managed to come up to speed. And even then, to be pulled into editorial would've been such an enormous leap, it may never, ever have happened. And I hated the marketing and publicity aspect of publishing, it was awful. No, I would've left publishing no matter what transformation had occurred. It had no heart in it. I love books and words too much to be in the business of selling them. But funny to notice the kind of nostalgia for publishing that movie aroused. It was good. You should see it.
posted by reasonably prudent poet at 9:42 AM
1 Comments:
You have written the only review of this movie that makes me want to see it, for something other than the clothing modeled. I have been enjoying "Ugly Betty" on network, have you seen it?
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