Long Live the Tenderness of the Novice Effort
On the vulnerability of "beginning"
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Long Live the Tenderness of the Novice Effort
“It's by the Wegmans,” my friend texted me. She was talking about a fashion show. I looked up from my phone and began searching for signs of a fashion show in a grocery store parking lot. Clearly, I didn't know much about what we were getting ourselves into. We'd previously made plans to have dinner, but a couple days before our scheduled hang she'd suggested going to this show instead, one that featured a designer she knew and liked. Tickets were $35 or something, and I readily agreed. Why not? I'd never sat in the audience of a fashion show — which explained why I raised no questions as I dodged shopping carts, eyes peeled for model-like people among normies stuffing bags of bread into their trunks.
But eventually I realized the show wasn't at the Wegmans but a bit beyond it, in a loft space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A group of brightly dressed people with cool haircuts loitered by a car with a booming speaker system near the entrance, all haloed by a scent of clove cigarettes and strong cologne. Taped to the main door behind them were instructions to proceed to the seventh floor for the event. Their bursts of laughter faded as I slid into an elevator with a young woman in a neon green nylon dress, and another person — older, with a softer face — who seemed to be her mother.
The elevator doors shut. The young woman, no more than twenty, sighed dramatically. “I saw a model down in the parking lot and I'm thinking ‘Girl, you're late,’” she said, presumably to her mother, but also seemingly to me. “I've never been late to work,” she went on. “One time, a girl was late to a show I was in and she got kicked out.”
The girl caught my eye, then quickly looked away to her mother, who blinked passively at the glowing numbers on the elevator buttons. Something caught in my chest, an emotion that moved like a balled fist opening.
But before I could name the feeling, the doors pinged open.
My friend Sabina was in a small queue starting at the threshold of the loft. She's a photographer and retoucher who’s worked in the world of fashion for years, so I felt sheepish as I hugged her and admitted, “This is my first fashion show.”
At that point, the closest thing I'd experienced to a runway show in real life was the time I competed in the Miss West Bloomfield pageant in a hotel conference room in Michigan at age nine, but I don't live under a rock. I'd seen photos of Kylie Jenner's lion head and Anna Wintour's bob, and who hasn't tuned into the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show at least once? So, as we chatted, I eyed my surroundings, comparing it all to the stereotypes.
The first thing I realized — though I’d gathered this from the price of the ticket alone — was that this was not a “high fashion” show. There were lots of not-quite fitted cotton and polyester blends worn by the other ticket holders milling around, plus inexpensive brand names plastered proudly across purses and t-shirts. The folding table in the corner that acted as the bar boasted one visible handle of mid-tier whiskey and a couple bottles of cheap rose. I — with my frizzy, air-dried hair, wearing a crop top I hadn't had time to shave the pills from — wasn't disappointed by this in the slightest. In fact, I was a little relieved.
The second thing I noticed was the runway itself. It was an open stretch of floor lined with two rows of folding chairs on either side. Glowing digital panels humming with the words “Brooklyn Fashion Week” separated the runway area from “backstage.” We settled in some chairs without printed “VIP” signs on the backs and soaked in the golden dye of a bulbous, setting sun through the loft windows as we waited. And waited.
This was the third thing I had no choice but to notice: the wait. The advertised show time came and went. The DJ would play a sizzle of music and everyone would turn expectedly, then deflate slightly when it was clear he was just testing audio levels. Eventually, an hour after the advertised showtime, only a handful of the VIP seats — the front row seats — were occupied, and a sunglasses-clad emcee announced the show would start soon. “Could everyone in the back rows please fill in the front?” he asked into the mic, and was hardly halfway through the sentence before the audience urgently pounced. And as we all did — quickly, hungrily — that unfurling fist I'd felt in my stomach in the elevator returned.
But again, before I could identify it, a woman emerged from the backstage partition. She was introduced as Laurie Cumbo, New York's Minister of Cultural Affairs.
“Welcome,” she said, smiling with all her teeth at us non-VIP guests, “to Brooklyn Fashion Week. We're so happy you could be here to support Brooklyn.” She explained this was an annual show organized by the city to feature Brooklyn-bred designers. She didn't say it outright, but I gathered the show was a kind of response to the notorious exclusivity of New York Fashion Week, a chance for lesser-known designers to show their wares. Cool, I kept thinking — until she spent an awkward amount of time thanking Eric Adams for appointing her to Cultural Affairs and regaling us with her plans to attend the Met Gala. She wanted to thank this person for doing her hair, and that designer for the dress she was going to wear... I couldn't help but wonder if she'd seen our mad dash for the VIP seats. But oddly, in my ribcage, there was that fist again, fingers blooming.
And then, a thrumming beat. It filled the space like syrup glugging from a bottleneck, and finally, out they came, one by one, the models sporting the first designer. The collection itself was eye-catching — a t-shirt dress made of teddy bears, a corset covered with buckles. But what caught my attention the most were the models themselves.
When I think of a “runway model,” I think of impossibly beautiful or interesting-looking people. These models in front of me felt... familiar. Accessible. Similarly, when I think of the face on said “runway model,” I think unsmiling, blank, gaunt; but some of these models couldn’t keep blushes or smiles away as we looked on. How they walked was varied, too; some took long strides, others stepped short. Some whizzed past, eager to make their round, while others paused too long at the end of the runway, causing odd traffic jams for other models who were forced to slow down and wait their turn. At one point, a model strutted down the runway with brazen confidence, throwing fake money into the air and leaving a trail of green paper in his wake — but hurried to clean it up moments later, bent over strangely to prevent his jeans slipping below his hips.
There were some models who really had “it” — though what even is “it” and why do I think that I, someone who knows near-nothing about modeling, can spot it? But that's the bizarre thing about “it” — it's indescribable, yet wholly present. It has far less to do with looks than it does essence. I'd wager most people have been in the presence of “it” before, and when “it” departs, its loss is keenly felt. From my perspective, the majority of these models didn't have “it,” but it was impossible not to wonder how many of them really wanted to have “it,” or really thought they did — who thought they could really make it.
That balled fist opening in my chest kept inching its fingers further and further from the palm; that feeling I'd been feeling all night was juicy. It was a soft feeling, a releasing feeling. And this time, along with it, there was a flash: a memory of a photograph between my fingers, my gut twisting as I looked at it. I was 13 years old. And once I was back there in my head — even with the bass thumping and models swishing by — the memories of everything that led to that moment with the photograph flooded in too.
—
When I was five years old, my parents took my brother and I to a pumpkin patch in Rochester, Michigan. There were donut stalls and hayrides and wooden structures painted with scarecrows, face holes cut out for kids to poke their heads through. There was also a covered stage set up for entertainment. At one point, my family and I were watching a singer up there, a guy with an acoustic guitar, and I guess he asked if anyone wanted to come up to the stage and sing with him. Apparently I walked right down the center aisle to stand at his side and request this man play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
He obliged. “You leaned in to the microphone,” my mom likes to emphasize when she retells the story, “as if you'd always known what to do.” Here, she always shakes her head in disbelief. “No fear,” she always says. “You had no fear.”
This was not the first time this happened, this early-onset draw towards limelight. About a year earlier, my parents had taken me to see a sold-out performance of Sesame Street Live at the Fox Theater in Detroit. My mom says, “One minute you were there next to me, the next... you were gone.” How I got past any kind of security I'll never know, but I'd managed to wiggle my way onto the stage and dance along with the performers until, eventually, a stagehand found an opportunity to whisk me out of the furry choreography. The point of all this is that from a very early age, I loved the kind of attention being an entertainer afforded. All through my childhood I participated in school plays and sang in choirs, but I always wanted more. I wanted to be big-time.
However, as a middle-class girl living in Michigan with two working parents and no ties to the entertainment industry, just how I was going to be a famous actress-singer-model-girlfriend-of-a-Hanson-brother was totally lost on me. Until one day, a flyer came in the mail that felt like the answer to my prayers. I remember thinking, this is the thing! The thing was obviously going to be the first step in my certainly long and starlit career; the thing was how I was going to get discovered. And the thing, god help me, was modeling school.
The name of the company was John Robert Powers, and their marketing tactics were genius — JRP promised an “in” to Hollywood for (mainly) young girls with celebrity dreams and parents with disposable incomes. I was their target market, and eventually, my parents conceded to my begging. Here's what I can recall about my experience with John Robert Powers modeling school: my parents would drop me off on Saturdays to a large corporate building in downtown Detroit where I would take an elevator to a stuffy room with tinted windows and a makeshift catwalk in place of a conference table. Our teacher was a middle-aged woman who scared us tween girls just enough into thinking she represented what real Hollywood “people” would be like, and she taught us what, we assumed, every child actor-model should know: how to walk a runway (was it the “right” way? I'll never know), how to introduce yourself in an audition, and the basics of personal hygiene, like making sure we always used our own towels after we showered (that particular lesson really stuck out to me as I remember thinking, I need to make sure my brother stops sharing my towel). We learned the importance of headshots (and could buy them from partners of JRP, just see the teacher after class), and our lunch breaks were always taken a few floors down in a cafeteria with big windows — I remember the windows because we were instructed not to turn on the lights; the daylight was all we had. Every Saturday, I would buy myself a bag of SmartPop White Cheddar popcorn from the vending machine, sit at the corporate cafeteria tables lit by the watery Michigan sun, and giggle away with the other aspiring actor-models in my class. It’s this — the popcorn, the laughing — that I remember most vividly of all from my time at JRP. The elatedness of being a young girl with hope.
Of course, John Robert Powers was mostly a scam. Not turning on cafeteria lights for their paying customers as a cost-saving effort should have been a red flag that not all was right with the business, but the company was eventually outed for using high-pressure sales tactics to keep themselves afloat, boasting false connections with famous actors by using their likeness in marketing materials without permission, and hosting events with “talent agents” who were merely employees of the company. I do remember going to auditions for commercials and TV shows once modeling school was over — and some of them really did feel like big deals at the time — but in my case, the only gig I ever got through JRP was an afternoon modeling clothes in a department store. And I do mean in the store — like, walking in a maze around racks and racks of clothes. To this day I have no idea how anyone shopping was supposed to know I was modeling anything, that I was not just a lost kid in a bucket hat looking for my mother.
The point is, it didn't take long after my modeling school stint for all my big-time acting/ modeling dreams to deflate; I realized, slowly, that John Robert Powers didn't really care about seeing me turn into the next Hilary Duff, and even worse, no one I auditioned for seemed to want to cast me in anything. I specifically remember my parents carting me to Chicago to an event known as Manhattan Model Search, another for-profit event where any Jane or John could sign up for a chance to meet “real talent scouts” — and by “meet,” I mean walk slowly in front of a line of them, holding a number and their eye contact, silently begging them to want you. But the pain of never hearing my number called after walking with my brightest smile (at that time, partially covered by orthodonture) before what seemed to be hundreds of agents was devastation like I had never known. What hurts more when I think back is that, around this time, my family was suffering a severe financial blow — and yet my parents still took me on this trip. They wanted to see me happy, but instead, probably went further into debt just to see my heart break.
Of course, what I'm describing is simply part of being human: learning to deal with rejection, failure, and the reality that the world (especially the entertainment industry) can be horrifically cutthroat. And clearly, I'm in no way endorsing John Robert Powers or any entity that preys on the dreams of kids to make a buck, but what was true in modeling school, in that little window of time before I received rejection after rejection, one slap of truth after another, was that I was beautifully open. I had no idea what I was doing, but I had a willingness to learn mixed with excited confidence. I wanted to be good at being an actor-model (buck teeth under enormous retainer and all!), but more than that, I wanted my dreams to be validated. And in that space, they were.
Eventually, my family moved to South Carolina and there was a part of me that was happy to leave all that negativity and rejection behind in the Michigan snow. By this time, I told myself I'd moved on from dreams of modeling and acting, but one day, at age 13, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror in our new home and thought I looked particularly beautiful. There were no cameras in phones then, so instead, I took a picture of myself with a disposable camera. I couldn't wait to get the picture developed; somewhere, deep inside me, that old flame of hope still burned — maybe I did have what it took to be a famous actress-model yet.
But when I got the pictures back in that shiny CVS photo envelope, I was flooded with shame. Who I saw in the picture didn’t look anything like the girl I thought I saw in the mirror the day I took it. The girl in the picture had uneven lips, a too-big nose, downward-sloping eyes, and popped blood vessels in her cheeks. She would never be a model, and she was not like the cute, pert actresses on Disney and Nickelodeon; her beauty was nothing to be marveled at. Hers was not the face in the centerfold of Tiger Beat or Bop. She didn't have “it.” The fear that was missing that day I sang at the pumpkin patch, or when I joined Elmo on stage at the Fox, or when I confidently strolled in front of beauty pageant judges in a mid-tier hotel conference room, exploded in me like a dam breaking.
No matter what I'd tried to tell myself, I did still want to be an entertainer. But holding that picture, I felt an earth-quaking certainty I would never, ever “make it” as one.
It’s one thing to be rejected by external sources — agents, scouts, judges. But it is a specific kind of death when you finally reject yourself.
—
Two rappers performed during the intermission of the Brooklyn Fashion Week show. The first guy really got the crowd moving; his lyrics were impressive, his beats had heads bobbing. The second rapper, however, was rough. Obviously, everyone's musical tastes vary, but it was clear by the mass exodus to the bathroom during his performance that few people were willing to endure this. As I made my own way to the toilet, there was a part of me that wondered if the guy was “bad” on purpose, but as much as I hoped it was high-level performance art, I knew deep down it was earnest. And there was that unfurling fist once more.
The fist happened again a few minutes later when I heard some girls in the bathroom line loudly making fun of him. I turned my eyes down to my feet, cheeks reddening. I couldn't help but want to defend him. I'm no stranger to being teased, after all. As much as I was a confident kid, I was just as awkward — a combination that made me a target for bullies, as I was somewhat of a challenge. He, like me in those trying-to-be-a-tween-model days, was so obvious in his desire to be applauded and seen, yet so painfully in need of honing his craft. I wasn’t sure if he was new to performing, but he presented as such — after all, being “bad” at something is often equated with being new to the game — and not looking or sounding like he knew what he was doing was more than enough to throw him to the tittering bathroom wolves.
To look like we know what we're doing feels safe; it avoids questioning, it puts people around us at ease. And so I think it's common to want to stay in this safe space, to not be seen or known as a novice, even when we are novices. To reveal you don’t know what you’re doing in any situation can feel upsetting, or even embarrassing — especially as an adult. I recently saw an Instagram post from a friend that sums up this theory perfectly; she owns her own small cider business, and she shared a picture of her dirty work overalls. She wrote that when she was first getting started, people in her industry would make fun of her because her work clothes were “too new.” Her post also reminded me of a time an ex-boyfriend teased me about wearing my just-purchased Converse sneakers on a stroll to the corner deli. “You can't wear them out like that,” he said. “You need to run them over with a car first.” What he meant was: Converses are only meant to be worn once they look like they're worn-in; it’s embarrassing to sport them straight from the box. The strangest part is, I agreed with him. I bought the Converses because I thought they were cool, but until they were scuffed, I'd just look like a poser; the newness was equated with a lack of authenticity and worthiness. The same went for my friend's clean overalls.
There's a too-common trope in movies and television shows that also exemplifies this well: the secret prodigy. Think of Chris Gardner, the homeless genius in The Pursuit of Happyness, or Beth Harmon, the child chess mastermind in The Queen's Gambit. We always root for this kind of character because to be an average person who wants to play chess and is only okay at it is, of course, not remarkable (and would not be entertaining). But why do so many of us hold ourselves to the standards of Chris or Beth? Even in underdog stories like Cool Runnings or Bring It On where the lead characters aren’t prodigies and don’t even win in the end, we’re led to believe they have something special — that they have “it” in one way or another.
The truth about being a work in progress, a novice, or someone who is starting over, is this: while we will always have both the desire to be good at the thing and a longing for acceptance, we might not ever become truly skilled, or get that validation. To be in this limbo is to be standing squarely in one of the most stunningly complex pockets of the human condition: a state of vulnerability. It’s impossible to traverse life without being a novice at some point — whether it’s picking up a new hobby, starting a new school or job, dating for the first time, the list goes on — and every time we identify as a newbie, we’re all but required to lay down our shields. There’s a universal understanding of how difficult this can be; if there wasn’t, there would be no “beginner” classes or training at anything, which exist to teach how to do things, but also to cater to raw vulnerability (it’s much easier to be in a space where awkwardness is expected when you’re feeling awkward, after all). But at some point, we must either progress or not, and to set ourselves up for potential failure, especially if the effort is earnest and good, takes a huge amount of guts. Furthermore, to bounce back from failure and rejection can feel impossible, even scar us. Perhaps this is why such visceral reactions can be stirred when we see someone being “bad,” or losing — we've all felt rejection before, and we naturally want to distance ourselves from the feelings and memories of pain. Perhaps this is why bathroom titterers make fun of novice rappers; to protect themselves from their own memories of being shunned, or embarrassed, or unaccepted — or vulnerable.
Of course, the ironic part of the novice effort is that even though we tend to want to hustle out of this early phase of being uncertain, to skip past the awkwardness and stumbling that comes along with learning to be good at something, to snap our fingers and be accepted by whichever seasoned professionals or peers we're hoping to please, once we actually do close the Gap, we tend to want to circle back around and again experience the phenomenon of beginning. Eventually, we want to find that freshness again, that spark that comes with being a novice. We want to remember what we felt before we were jaded, to see our craft through fresh eyes. For example, I was a little embarrassed I thought the Brooklyn Fashion Week show might be in a grocery store parking lot — but doesn't a parking lot fashion show sound like just the thing any avante garde fashion house might do? How funny that those innocent mistakes we make at first, those mistakes that accidentally cross boundaries, are exactly the kind of thing that becomes, eventually, coveted.
There is no real solution to the problem of wanting what you don't have at any stage in your hobby or career; it will forever be the unsolvable puzzle of why we must learn before we can unlearn. My point is, there is such raw humanity in the novice effort, and I wish, as a society, we could do better at savoring it. Life will do the rest for us; we will be told we aren't good enough, or we will tell ourselves we aren't good enough — we will reject certain dreams, and that will be hard enough. Or we will simply find other things to try, and the tides of life will push and pull us as it does. And in the specific case of entertainment, while I'm glad there are so many more opportunities now than there were when I was a tween to entertain and garner a following (and not have to fit a very specific looks profile to do it), rejection will always be there, whether it's by a teacher or a friend or a lover, a casting agent or a TikTok video with minimal views. Life, in one way or another, will present us with challenges and wins, and eventually we will figure out what feels right for us and what we need to drop.
But in order to find out, we must try — and if we can't find a way to appreciate the effort itself, perhaps we can at least admire the vulnerability it took to try in the first place.
—
As the show closed and the models made their final rotations, I felt an immense appreciation for that space; a space for trying, the relative little leagues. The kind of place people can build confidence before the world tears them down, or not. Where a DJ can fiddle with his music in front of a live audience and the show time can be delayed without anyone asking for their money back. Not all spaces can be like this, nor should they. But when they exist, like a dark cafeteria of laughing tweens who would never see a real runway, it is its own brand of beautiful.
Of course, I know nothing about those models in Brooklyn Fashion Week; maybe none of them wanted to be professionals at all. Or perhaps they did want to be pros, and some will even get there. Maybe some of them were professionals already — I admit, I'm only speculating. But the point is, instead of looking for the flaws and critiquing each and every one, I found myself silently cheering them on, even if another part of me knew it was cheering in vain. And that's when I named that feeling in my chest, that feeling that blossomed, my balled fist opening: empathy.
Empathy for the young woman in the elevator who just wanted me, a stranger, to know she, too, was a model. For the cultural minister, who may have seemed like she was bragging, but to me revealed the little girl inside who may have never thought she'd have a chance to go to the Met Gala — and look at her now. Even for the audience, jumping at a chance to sit in the better seats, people probably not used to VIP treatment, and especially for the rapper, who so earnestly gave a performance he'd probably practiced again and again. All of these people wanted, in some way, confirmation that they were allowed to be in that space, to level up. All these people just wanted to feel recognized.
At the very end of the show, we all applauded as the designers took turns walking up and down the runway, bowing and nodding and shaking their hands folded in prayer — but one designer erupted from backstage and danced up and down the runway, loose and free, laughing with her head thrown back. This can be another sign of someone inexperienced, I thought — blatant excitement. And how sad is that? That eventually the goal is to get so used to success that you also get used to keeping your emotions at bay, or even more depressing, lose that excitement altogether?
Perhaps — but that was not this girl, not now. She spun around and around, nearly tripping over herself with ecstatic joy. In whatever rulebook society has that deems what is professional and what is not, this manic display of happiness was surely not. But I stood up for her and clapped louder. Louder for her energy, louder for her authenticity, louder for the tenderness I hoped she would keep as life barrels on, as her newness morphed into experience. And I hoped even more that she would always remember the feeling of this moment, when nothing could stop her, and there was nowhere to go but forward and up. The feeling of hope, right at the start.