affable nature.
‘Great.’ He winked as his BlackBerry buzzed abruptly. ‘Well, let’s do this–go ahead and get her ready.’ Handing me a card from his wallet that read ‘Green Management’ in embossed lettering, Steve motioned to the phone perched between his ear and shoulder. ‘It’s a call from Paris, doing big things over there–closing some deals…I gotta take this.’
Halfway through her makeup, Brooke handed me a bag stuffed with bits of hair, smiling sweetly as if I knew just exactly what to do with it.
‘Here ya go, for my hair,’ she said taking her shoulder-length hair out of its ponytail holder. I was immediately dumbfounded. Makeup for me was a slam-dunk, but hairpieces? I had never even seen anyone put extensions in before!
‘Oh, your hair is so beautiful already, you don’t need these.’ I shrugged, trying to play it cool–I thought I had covered every possible disastrous scenario in my obsessing earlier on–but this was something I hadn’t thought of. I didn’t want her to think I was an amateur, because at twenty-two years old, I was barely her senior–I didn’t want her to know that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
‘No, I have to have them, they complete my whole–my whole, well you know, my “Pillow Talk” vibe or whatever you want to call it,’ she said.
‘Pillow talk?’ I asked, forgetting to reference my call sheet once more.
‘That’s my first single–have you heard my album? It’s the song about being best friends forever…do you know it?’
Ignoring her question I looked down at the bag of hair again. ‘Your hair has so much body the way it is, you really should try wearing it the way you have it now.’ I winced, hoping she would just go along and agree with me.
‘I really need them…I can’t shoot “Pillow Talk” without them,’ she pleaded, wide-eyed. I imagined that any other girl in her position would’ve either thrown a fit or fired me by that point, but Brooke stared up at me like a child begging to stay up past her bedtime. In all honesty, it would’ve been easier if she wasn’t so sweet, and I realized that there was no getting out of it.
‘All right, you’re the boss,’ I said, trying as hard as I could to appear upbeat as I plunged my hand into the bag full of hairy little extension pieces in disgust. Here goes nothing, I thought as I struggled with one of the snap clips.
‘Oh here,’ Brooke, seeing my struggle, said. As I watched her miraculously pop the clip open by simply applying pressure to the ends with her fingers, I knew I had blown my cover–I couldn’t even open the damn things. To my surprise, she handed it right back to me, thinking nothing of it.
‘So, who usually does your hair?’ I asked her sorting through weft pieces of varying widths, contemplating which ones to use.
‘Oh, sometimes my ma does it, or my friend Hayley. I had been using this one lady from back home for a while. She was supposed to come up here with me today but she has…arthritis real bad?’ She posed the bit of information to me as a question, as if she was suddenly scared she had confused arthritis with algorithm, or another word starting with the letter a that she didn’t quite understand.
‘Mmm-hmm,’ I answered, signaling that she had used the correct term.
‘Yeah, I don’t know much about it but her wrists and stuff swell up pretty bad–it’s hard for her to grip things…’
‘Oh man,’ I hummed unenthusiastically, hoping our conversation was distracting her from the disaster that was slowly becoming her head. To create a ‘fuller look’ (or at least that’s what I told myself I was doing), I had stacked the pieces on top of one another. Clipping in the last piece, I stepped back to survey my work, which to my horror resembled a stacked perm with hair of entirely uniform length.
‘You did that fast! I’ve never had anyone put them in without straightening my hair first–it saves so much time,’ she squealed, the color draining from my face as I realized I skipped a vital step. She swiveled around in her chair and I braced myself for tears–hers following my own. Now, face-to-face with my new ‘head creation,’ she pondered her reflection in the mirror for a few seconds before erupting into a big smile.
‘I look just like Cleopatra in that one movie!’
Stardom isn’t a profession; it’s an accident.
–Lauren Bacall
‘Oh my God! What did you do to her hair?’ Robert screamed out, suddenly appearing out of nowhere, and not caring that everyone within a mile radius could hear him. I had to think fast and save face.
‘It’s a new look, everyone’s doing it in Europe,’ I lied.
‘I love it!’ Brooke gleamed, still staring in the mirror and ignoring Robert. ‘It looks amazing!’
Now, I knew it didn’t…and so did Robert, but time was running out and at this point I was just happy that Brooke liked anything I did. Scowling at me, Robert took Brooke’s hand and yanked her out of the makeup trailer.
Though the fear of coming face-to-face with that awful hairdo again was almost more than I could bear, I was booked for the length of the shoot, which included touchups for all three scenes. I winced as Brooke emerged onto the set, waiting for gasps of shock from the crew as the dancers rushed to avert one another’s eyes from the horror. But to my surprise there were no stunned silences or shrieks of terror–only the sound of giddy anticipation from those excited to finally begin filming. ‘Brooke!’ A petite male, one of her dancers I assumed, called out. When I realized his attention was focused on the top of her head, I cringed. ‘That is so beat!’
I wasn’t sure what ‘beat’ meant, but from the smile on his face as well as the admiring looks from the others around him it didn’t appear to be a bad thing. Happy to be the center of attention, Brooke cleared her throat as if she were about to make a speech.
‘I’ve dreamt of filming a music video like this since I was just a little girl,’ she sighed sweetly to her dancers–who jumped up and down, playfully cheering her on–and members of the video production team that were within earshot. ‘Thank you all for making my dreams come true today. The fact that I’m just standing here…well it’s all so serendipident.’ Serendipident? I cringed–she already looked so silly standing up there with that huge mop of misplaced extensions on her head–and now she’s making up words! But no one seemed to notice. They were all completely charmed by her.
Like the ‘Pillow Talk’ lyrics, the story idea for the shoot was pretty simple; therefore, the director spent an inordinate amount of time shooting what he kept calling ‘attention-grabbing angles’ to make the most out of what little they had to work with. Despite the title of the song, the first scenes we worked on–like the one where Brooke dances up and down the aisle of a school bus with girlfriends–seemed innocent enough. After that day, ‘Pillow Talk’ would be stuck in my head forever.
Looking up at the clock in the dressing room, I yawned. It had been a long day and I couldn’t wait for shooting to begin on the final segment–the slumber party scene. I went to work, prepping Brooke and two of the actresses hired to play her ‘BFFs’ while the production team set up.
With a tiara in her hand, Brooke made her way across the set, where the director was busy testing out different filters and gels, asking those around him which gave off the most surreal look.
‘Robert wanted me to give this to you–it’s part of my costume,’ said Brooke, clad in a fluffy pink robe.
‘A tiara, huh? That’s very fitting.’ I smiled, struggling to nestle the rhinestone-encrusted tiara in between the stacked wefts. Suddenly, I became aware of a presence