I was walking down Broadway in New York City, on my way to apply for a job; a busboy job near my college. I had taken some care to clean up, as the last (and first) interview I’d had to work in a restaurant ended badly when the maitre’d noticed I had dirt under my fingernails and knew that I had been lying about having done this kind of work before.
I was approached on the street by a fashion scout – they asked me if they could take my picture, for use in a fashion shoot. I didn’t think much more about it, walked down to my interview, and was told they’d call me if I got the job.
The next day I got a phone call from the scouting agency, telling me they wanted to use me in a Levi’s ad, and they would pay me $1500 to do it! This was 1992 I think, and since I was a broke college student, this was more than I had ever made in a month.
A few days later I went to the address that I’d been given, a beautiful old carriage house on the Upper West Side. A nice older man with big glasses and white hair met me at the door, and we did the shoot, which took all of about 1/2 hour. He was using the biggest camera I’d ever seen – the negatives were 8.5” x 11” and he had two assistants loading the film for him… everyone was very nice, the shoot went great, I got a check for $1500, and off I went.
Turns out that this nice old man was Richard Avedon, who was one of the most famous fashion photographers of the 20th Century. It also turns out that I had a party at my house that weekend which got out of control and at which I got banged up pretty badly (is there a 43 things list for “get beat up by 5 guys”?) When I had dinner with the great old photographer a few days after the party, he got all enthused about my bandages and new scars and invited me back for a new shoot.
This is one of the biggest blips on my personal history – I got paid more for 15 minutes of standing in front of a camera than I’d ever gotten for anything else before (and for many things since) – changed my whole sense of what $ and work were worth, and what value was. Work as a bus boy after that? No way… :)
