Fashion, Faut Pas

When you're on a tour in the circus, a rhythm sets in and things can sometimes get to be a little monotonous. But every so often, an exciting side gig or special event comes along and shakes things up a bit. I was lucky enough to be chosen for just such a special event when I was asked if I wouldn't mind being part of a photo shoot for one of Switzerland's most widely circulated magazines!

At first, I was really excited. I was the only one in the troupe who would be featured in the shoot, and they were even flying in a model from New York for one day only, just for one shoot at our little circus! I would be in my wheel in full costume and make-up and I was told that as a main feature in the magazine, the photo would take up at least a quarter of the page, maybe more.

But my excitement quickly turned into some serious feelings of insecurity.

The model was stunning. She was exactly what you would imagine if someone told you to picture a fashion model in your head. Tall, slender, blonde, cheekbones to die for... and when the camera started clicking, she easily maneuvered from one sultry pose to the next with barely a second in between positions.

Me? Well, at first they wanted me upside down. But then they decided I was "so cute" that I could stand upright behind the model. Yipee... where she is tall, I am quite short. Where she is slender, I am muscular, almost boxy by comparison. I swear, in the photos I saw afterward, I looked like a squat little dwarf...

Moreover, no one told me what to do or where I should look. So sometimes I looked at the model, sometimes the camera. I had a very limited range of movement because I was standing in the wheel and any shift in weight would have caused it to roll out of the position desired for the shot. I had no idea why I was even there.

In the photos I saw afterward, I mostly look like I hate the model and maybe want to murder her. In the ones that I thought I looked good, the model was typically shifting from one pose to another. In the ones where she looked good, I looked like I was going to do her bodily harm.

When I pointed this out to the photographer, he insisted I just looked proud. I'm not so sure about that. Fortunately, he said he could just take her from one photo and me from another to make one super photo. I really hope he does.

The entire thing left me feeling terribly self-conscious and unattractive. I know that people have different standards of beauty, and many people at the circus reassured me that they like the way I look way more than the model looked, but my self-worth seemed to have decreased considerably from when I got up in the morning.

One thing I really like about circus is that very often it shows women of many different body types. They range from the petite and fit hand-to-hand flyer, the strong and slender aerialist, the muscular firecracker acrobat, and everything in between. Circus showcases every kind of woman, for the most part*, healthy and strong, each and every one of them beautiful.

I know this to be true. But when all was said and done, I certainly didn't feel that way. And the blow was that much harder as it came at me from inside my own home. The entire thing shook me in ways that I can't express. They were made all the more confusing by events that would occur the following evening...



* Like many fields (or just plain life) where the body is subject public scrutiny, eating disorders lurk. Luckily, I haven't encountered it much in my career. But that is not a subject I wish to address at this time.