FN Blog - Seven heads are better than one!

Silly Putty – tdmk. A trademark for a soft colored modeling material that can be stretched and bounced.

The silliest things I’ve ever done in my life have all involved money.

After chucking what was supposed to be a dream job in SGV & Co., where I basically counted beans for a living (okay, fine, I wrote accounts receivable, payroll and inventory software in dBase III+, guess what year), I really thought my next and future life would just become one fabulous glam slam under the klieg lights, sashaying (yes, in that hip-swinging motion we were known to have walked in then) down the runway, or “emoting” (trademark emotions: Headache Pose, Stomachache Pose, or Hug the Backdrop) in the studio.

But no. Apparently, once you agreed to become a Professional (as opposed to an Unprofessional) Model, you had to act “professional” at all times, fulfilling your modeling responsibilities to the best of your sashaying and emoting abilities.
Whoever the client was. And it wasn’t always Inno Sotto, Raymund Isaac or Rustan’s.

“Que se joda’ng si Aling Tinay, modista ng baranggay, ang designer,” announced either Tina Maristela or Tetta Ortiz, I forget which 80s top model, during my first modeling workshop as a newly recruited PMAP (Professional Models Association of the Philippines) neophyte in 1989, “because you are a professional, you will ‘model’ the garment as if it were a YSL.” And they didn’t mean Yari sa Laguna.

Certainly, you could be choosy about who or what to ‘model’ for—if you looked “Unforgettable” in a Heno de Pravia way and your name was Tweetie de Leon. But mine wasn’t, and since I was new and every job that came through on our Easy Calls (or Pocketbell, if you were less soci) meant food on the table (which we shunned anyway to keep looking skeletal) and rent for the month, every job worth saying yes to was worth doing well.

Even if you had to be…Mrs Claus.

“It’s easy money, and no one will ever see it,” beeped the casting agent about the commercial, “it will air only in Cebu during the Christmas season for a raffle promo.”
All I had to do, he said, was hand over a gigantic prize check from Gaisano Department Store to my spouse Santa, and smile…

..and, of course, wear this:

What the heck, I said to myself in what would be the first of many rationalizations of this kind pertaining to circumstances involving shame—and money. I had nothing to do that night anyway, except moisturize, and maybe practice walking down the five-meter-length of masking tape I had stretched out over my five-meter-long studio apartment floor, in four-inch-heels. “He’s right, who will ever see it? ” I reassured myself. I didn’t know anyone in Cebu anyway.

And so, it came upon a midnight clear that the shoot went rather smoothly. Although I couldn’t fathom just how far I had come from debugging complex chunks of logic in computer code as my livelihood to this: clowning around in a costume to make the rent, the irony was lost on me the minute I got my cold Christmas cash, kaliwaan, right after the very last Ho!Ho!Ho! of the jolly old rotund expat that they had, like me, talked into spreading tidings of comfort and joy for a quick buck.

I quickly put the experience aside and stuffed it in my closet of modeling skeletons, never to be unearthed again. Until three months later, when I found myself booked at the Cebu Plaza Hotel with the country’s top models for a Randy Ortiz show on December 23. Sure enough, at the breakfast buffet the morning after our first night there, all the models were laughing as they started calling me—you guessed it—Mrs. Claus! The Gaisano commercial had been airing on TV all night long, and all the people who I hoped would never, ever see me at the lowest point of my modeling career thus far, did.

I bowed my head in disgrace, but I knew they understood. “Racket lang,” was the implicit raison d’etre. We all knew that this business was unstable, with peak fashion show seasons letting you rake it in for half the year, and low-season work lulls causing you to starve (which was always a good thing for a model anyway). Eventually, the more in-demand you became, the more discretion you could exercise in choosing jobs, but in the end, the most successful models were the ones who kept working and working. The models most likely to get lots of bookings were the ones you could rely on to do a good job precisely because they were always eager and game, always gung-ho and not afraid to look, well, lame, if the situation called for it.

And so with this mindset, I rarely turned down jobs, going as far as agreeing to be a movie extra (fashion show sequence naman, who would ever see it?) in Dyesebel with Alice Dixson and Secrets of Pura with Alma Moreno. I even appeared every morning at 7:30 a.m. on the exercise show The Gym Team, where in addition to bouncing around in neon-hued dental floss Spandex, I wrote all the scripts for a whole season. As you can see in the rundown of my previous occupations in my FN Blogger profile, I kept a very open mind about the jobs that came my way.

In TV commercials, I played all sorts of roles, among them a Carefree-panty shield-wearing florist, a Chow King-noodle-eating China Doll, a Chow King eating flapper dancing to Rico Mambo, a head-turning, dandruff-afflicted fashion plate plugging Selsun Blue to the tune of “Let It Snow” as my flakes flew all over the place, an Ovaltine Light-sipping Peter Pan suspended in mid-air and strapped to a harness at the crotch (ouch!) and a flying machine. I was Silly Putty in the clients’ hands.

But the silliest thing I must say I ever did for money happened when I was based in Hong Kong, where I had a hard time finding work for fashion shows because at 5’7”, I wasn’t considered tall enough. I did mostly print editorial work for magazines, which didn’t really pay much. It was ads that did, and finally, after waiting for weeks, my agent called me about a high paying print ad job.

“Easy money,” she said, making me instantly think, uh-oh… All I had to do, she explained, was hold on to a flat iron, and look like this:

“No one will ever see it, or recognize you,” she said. “It will only appear in the newspaper—“

“Ok I’ll do it,” I didn’t let her finish. It hurt, but I’m sure I wasn’t chosen because of my exquisite Oriental beauty, but because I was the one model in the agency who would actually be willing to do such a silly thing. Piece of cake, I thought. Five years down the line in the biz, I think I had become immune to all these “challenging” assignments. Again, what the heck!

The caveat—the hair and makeup had to be done not at the studio but in a salon, which happened to be a famous, high-end, big-name one on the ground floor of a five-star hotel frequented by Hong Kong’s richest tai tais and chi chi fashion plates.

As I strode into the swanky salon, I felt privileged to be pampered and prettified in a place whose services I could never afford. Until I remembered that I was there to be uglified and de-glamorized in order to simulate the required look of electrocution. It only took two hours and an expert team of hairdressers to fry my hair to look like stiff corkscrews. I tried not to look in the mirror or at the well-heeled clientele as I walked out the door.

I stood outside in the hotel driveway to meet MeiMei, the tiny ad agency P.A. I caught a reflection of myself on the window of a limo that pulled up. Oh God. I looked like Weird Al Yankovic. Or Yahoo Serious. Never mind! I told myself. Think of the money!

“ Ah canna figh da wan,” squeaked MeiMei as she got off her cell phone.

“What?” I had no idea what she was saying.

“Ah canna figh da wan,”she repeated.

“The wan?” I clarified.

“Wi ha ta tik taxi to stchoodeeyo, I canna figh da drywah o da wan,” ”

She pulled me, the now 6’3” Medusa-haired giantess, towards the hotel taxi queue where 20 people, all well-dressed yuppie types, had lined up. You’ve got to be joking, I thought. Ten minutes into the wait, it became clear to me that I had nothing to fear. Unlike in the Philippines were being in a similar situation might have elicited not a few rude uzi (usisero) stares or even catcalls, no one even gave me a second look. No one gave a hoot.

The shoot was a breeze, and I even had a blast. My comic skills were put to the test. I was laughing the entire time. I could never put the photos in my portfolio, but it was all in a day’s work. And again, I was richer for just trying.

When I settled back in Manila for good, I got a call from Earl, a fashion show director’s assistant who sidelined as a caster. “Ahteh, type mo? Video for the Korean Tourism Board, US $500, kaliwaan. They’ll just film you against Philippine tourist spots for one day…”

“Join!” I, along with four other fellow model racketeers, said.

It was really easy money and easy work. They shot me in Anilao, Batangas, wearing long floral dresses, standing by the beach or sitting in a banca. But maybe I should have been suspicious when the recurring instructions given to me for every scene were:

“Look far,” and “Look sad.”

Because one night, three years later, when I had retired from all this silliness and was working late in the old Summit office as the fashion editor for Preview magazine, I got a frantic call from one of my model friends, Gina. She was calling from I/O KTV on Jupiter St., where she was out with her boyfriend’s sosyal friends.

“Oh my God, Myrza! How embarrassing! I wanted to die! Remember those tourism videos we did for the Koreans?”

I hope you never see mine.