This one’s free
Do you ever feel like no other living thing on planet earth actually knows what a Wednesday is?
Only humans.
Well. It's Wednesday. Shoot day, baby.
I have decided I have done enough and whatever life has decided otherwise today, I will face it head-on, smile-up, middle-finger-down.
It's a really healthy start. I'm out here doing my best, feeling magical, not committing crimes and obviously wearing pants.
I mean shorts. Short shorts. They enable flexible leg movement, which matters, because there is going to be crouching. Knees on the floor kneeling.
Honestly? Iconic.
Because that's what I am. A fucking dazzling little overachiever.
I also have my period today. Do I complain about it? No. Do people know about it? Also no. I take two painkillers and put on my loafers, white socks, a very pretty pair of black lace shorts and a shirt with a tiny bow.
It isn't the usual I'm-all-business-girlboss look. But then who decided power has one aesthetic? Not me. I'm wearing something that makes me feel controlled and comfortable, and by comfortable I mean comfortable enough to tell a grown man he needs to step it up and be significantly better.
I know they say the devil wears Prada. But I lowkey prefer Dior.
So Jenny can handle all the motivational, hopeful, professional words while I try to control every single expression on my face this afternoon.
Which is, largely: what the — and also, motherfucker.
Which we cannot say out loud in front of our very first client.
Maddy: we there in 10
Jenny: I'm already here
Jenny: 247 GYM is VERY excited
Jenny: he keeps saying "content"
Maddy: oh no
Jenny: its fine. I said “great content” so we’re best friends
Maddy: JENNY
Jenny: he's lovely. And also 51
Twelve photographs. One athlete. Two of the shots go on a window decal, four go on Instagram over the next month, and the rest live in a folder they'll use for whatever they think of later.
Mike gets paid, the gym gets content, and Jenny and I get a case study and enough money for approximately nine coffees each.
I’m not sad for myself, or Jenny. My business partner and I are in the same boat now. We agreed we needed the coffees.
And the case study.
Truth is, nobody hires two girls who have done nothing.
Somebody has to be first, and 247 Gym said yes on a Tuesday after eleven people said no, and I am going to make them look like the smartest small business in New Jersey.
No pressure.
“So I was picturing,” Ricky tells us girls, “him with the weights. Like, doing the weights.”
Ricky owns 247 Gym. Ricky is fifty-one, has forearms like industrial cabling, and has clearly been thinking about this for a week.
“Mm.” I nod, smile cheerfully while Jenny stands next to me chipping in. “That sounds perfect.”
“No. The smiling is the important thing. He needs to smile in every picture.” Rick reminds us.
Jenny gives him another assurance. “Absolutely agree. We’ll make sure that’s exactly what Mike will do.”
I go through the shot list on my iPad, which I have SMILE in every single shot note next to Will’s notes, which mainly says fake and okay and don’t smile too much and turn 45. Helpful notes. I don’t think I could push half of them to Ricky.
“People like a smile. Less intimidating, you know.” Ricky continues to tell us.
They do. People like a smile. They also like aspiration, and there is a specific type of photograph where a very fit man holds a dumbbell and grins at the camera, and that photograph says I have been paid to be here, and it converts absolutely nobody.
But you don't say that in minute four to the man who signed.
“Let’s get the smiling shots.” I look up from my iPad. “Then we do a couple of experimental shots and you pick.”
Ricky is delighted. Ricky has been given a choice, which is the same thing as being given control, which is the same thing as being happy.
Jenny catches my eye across the gym and mouths something French at me.
When will this girl ever understand that I don’t speak French?
Mike arrives on time, in the navy pair, already warm and pumped for me because I told him to do fifty push-ups before he walked through that gym door.
And for forty minutes, Lucy shoots for us.
Lucy is a junior in visual arts who charges eighty dollars and is worth four hundred, and she does not speak for the first thirty minutes of the job.
Dumbbell. Smile. Dumbbell, different angle, smile. Mike leaning on the rack with his arms folded. Mike mid-curl looking towards the window, which is the best of them, because it's the only one where he isn't performing at me.
It's fine.
It's completely fine.
These photographs could be done with any large man in that frame, or a mannequin with a wig on.
Lucy comes over and shows me the back of the camera without saying anything, which is Lucy for you know.
I try to control what my face is doing while Jenny handles Ricky, chatting with him about what he wants to do with the photos later and why he opened the gym in the first place.
“Give me a minute.” I have my hands on my hips, a head tilted on the side and a frown that is deepening with the seconds that Mike has to come over and physically smoothen them out for me.
“What’s wrong with the photos?” He asks me innocently.
I turn to Mike and scan him up and down. “No. You’re perfect. Nothing wrong with the photos.”
And that’s the freaking problem.
“Can you do the hip thing for me?” I gesture at Mike’s hip.
Mike stares at me. “The what?”
Here’s what people who only photograph Mike Corriveau absolutely do not know about Mike Corriveau.
Mike Corriveau has forty-one thousand followers on Instagram. Forty-one thousand people follow a football player from a school with no football reputation. Sorry Princeton. Truth hurts.
They do not follow him for his face, which is a good face but not a forty-one-thousand-follower face.
They follow him because eleven weeks ago he started posting these ninety-second videos of himself doing a thing where he loads a bar, sets his feet, and then does something with his hips at the bottom of a squat that he explains in a voice like a man defusing a bomb.
Two hundred thousand views. Then four hundred. Then one that did nine hundred thousand and got stitched by an actual professional in Texas.
And we’ve been spending forty minutes photographing him holding a dumbbell and fucking smiling.
“The hip thing. From the videos. The one where you set your feet and then you do the—” I do it. Badly. In loafers. In front of my client, my photographer, my business partner and a football player. “That.”
“That's not a pose, Fairfax, that's— I'm actually teaching people something.” Mike points at me, eyes wide.
“I know. That's why we're doing it.” I'm already moving the light stand, which I am not qualified to move and am moving anyway. “Load the bar. Properly. Whatever you'd actually put on it.”
“For a photo?”
“For a photo.”
“Maddy, if I load that bar properly I'm going to have to actually lift it.”
“Then lift it.”
Ricky comes over. “Did we get all the shots? We can wrap it up cause I need to open the gym.”
“We got everything in the shot list.” I turn to him with my entire face. “We got all of yours, they're beautiful. We’re just trying something.” I look down at my watch. “We’ve got another twenty minutes. This is the extra one. This one's free.”
“Free?” Ricky already smiles.
“Free.” I hold up my hands. “You keep it, you don't have to use it, and if you hate it we never speak of it again.”
You will not be shocked to learn that nobody in the history of commerce has said no to free while it's already happening.
“Okay,” Ricky nods fast. “Sure. Yeah.”
And then Mike loads the bar, and it stops being a photoshoot.
Because a man who is performing looks like a man who is performing. And a man who is doing the actual thing he is good at, with genuine weight on his back, in front of people, forgets entirely that there is a camera in the room.
His face changes. His whole face. He goes somewhere.
I get down on the floor because the floor is where the shot is and my knees are the least important thing in this building. Lucy is already down there. Neither of us says anything for four minutes.
“Again,” I say.
He does it again.
“Again, and this time say the cue out loud like you do on Insta. The whole thing. Talk us through it.”
“There's nobody to talk to.”
“Talk to me.”
So Mike Corriveau does a heavy squat while explaining hip position to a girl lying on a rubber floor in lace shorts, and his voice does the thing it does in the videos, and Lucy takes about ninety frames.
And in the middle of it, at the bottom of the third one, he grins at absolutely nothing and that's the photograph.
That's the whole campaign. Right there. Frame sixty-something.
Nobody posed. Nobody smiled at anybody. And it is worth more than every single thing we shot in the first forty minutes because it's true, and people can tell, they can always tell, that's the only thing anybody can actually tell.
Lucy shows Ricky the back of the camera.
Ricky is quiet for a while. That worries Jenny, Mike and Lucy all at once. Me? I’m still on the rubber floor looking for the next angle in case Ricky hates it.
“Can we use this one on the window?”
My head jerks up at Ricky’s question.
I turn fully towards him. “It’s yours. You can use anything you want. It's free.”
Jenny turns away and coughs into her fist.
Fifteen minutes later, Mike hooks an arm around my neck and nearly removes me from the earth. “You follow me on Instagram?”
“Duh. I do my homework.” I wink at him and duck out from under his arm. “The athletic department should be embarrassed. If they gave you another protein shake and asked you to drink it in the locker room bench, I’d die.”
“Huh.” He looks genuinely thrown for a second. “Am I getting paid for the free one?”
“Nope. None of us are. But we’re building your portfolio, Mike.”
“Fairfax— We should get paid fairly.”
“Which is exactly what business school would tell you.” I point at him.
“What school doesn’t tell you, Mike, is that your face will be going on a window on Nassau Street that opens 247, and I’m also going to tag you on my Insta.
Say hello to eighty thousand followers and double the paycheck on your next campaign. ”
Mike blinks at me. “You’re kind of terrifying.”
“I’ve been told.” I clap his shoulder and give him the sweetest smile I own.
Then we pack up. Professionals. Obviously.
“Why did you give Ricky that free shot that was not on the list?” Jenny catches me in the car park.
“Because in three weeks that photograph is going to be four feet high in a window that two thousand students walk past every day,” I tell her. “And the next gym that walks past it isn't going to ask me for a proposal. They're going to ask me what I charge.”
Jenny looks at me for a second.
Then she gets her phone out. “Fine. I'm messaging the pilates place.”
“Jenny. That one said no. And we only have male athletes on our roster.”
“They said no last week— They hadn't seen the window last week,” Jenny says, and keeps typing.
God, I love her.
When I told Jenny about this, two weeks into knowing her, in a library, with no clients and no athletes and no plan and a spreadsheet with nothing in it, she didn't say it was ambitious.
Nobody has ever said ambitious to me and meant it as a compliment.
She said, “Okay. How do we do it?”
Five words. Present tense. We.
That's how I know somebody's mine.
It’s also the sentence only my family has said to me.
I love them. They're my everything. Lizzie gives me the best tips on makeup and perfume, because how else is a girl supposed to flirt except by looking amazing and smelling delicious from far enough away to stay untouchable?
Collins taught me how to be shameless and completely unapologetic about it. And Logan, my eldest brother, taught me what hard work actually means and what a goal actually is.
Which I always hit. Because that's what I do.
I have a goal and then I make it happen, and I have been doing it since primary school.
Fifth grade, I decided I was going to make a magazine and sell it to my friends. Logan didn't tell me that was unrealistic. Logan showed me how to get it printed properly, in colour, and explained what marketing was to a ten-year-old.
Junior year, I decided I was going to charge people for tickets to parties at our house instead of theirs, because everybody else's parents hated high school parties. Collins and Logan didn't tell me a sixteen-year-old couldn't run a party.
They wrote me a checklist.
Lighting. Music. Food. Which alcohol, specifically. Security. Backup plan if somebody passes out. A no-drugs policy, in writing, non-negotiable.
Then they drove me to the store to stock up on drinks and snacks, because athletic arms trump the useless muscles of a junior in a mini skirt.
Every single thing I have ever built, somebody drove me to the store for.
Nobody drove me today.