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dark circles under your eyes. Makeup for black-and-white photography is very different from makeup for color. Color means a print ad, not just a newspaper ad. And if you get magazine work, you’re doing really, really well.”
    Sharon hadn’t done “really, really” well as a model. She had been a flight attendant for Pan Am for ten years, but only domestic and not the more coveted international. Then she’d been a hand model in Miami. This surprised me because her hands were absolutely enormous and surely would have dwarfed anything they held, with the exception of a Big Gulp from 7-Eleven. But realistically, Sharon didn’t have the face to be even a catalogue model. She had a horse face: long and boxy, with large ears and a nose with a bulbous tip. And although I understood her face for what it was the instant I saw her, it took Sharon years to accepther own lack of traditional beauty. “I’m just not that pretty,” she said. “I have nice hands, and I have nice legs. But my face is just so-so. But I make the most of it. And that’s what you’re going to learn to do here.”
    I liked Sharon more than the other modeling instructors because she didn’t seem resentful that she was teaching as opposed to modeling.
    Phillip, for example, always seemed slightly hostile that he still had not achieved a magazine cover. It seemed obvious to me that Phillip would always be a modeling teacher and not a model. But he, himself, had not come to this conclusion. Phillip apparently still had ambitions of one day leaving this teaching crap and ending up with his face on a Times Square billboard in an advertisement for Salem cigarettes or perhaps a Norelco shaver. “It’s a tough-as-nails business,” he would say on cigarette break.
    But Sharon really liked teaching. Maybe if I’d had her for Greek mythology at Amherst Regional Junior High School, I might not have left in the first place.
    “Nice shadow,” she said to me after I applied dark mascara to the line of my cheekbone. “Looks pretty funny here under the lights, but in a black-and-white photo, that would be incredible. You really have excellent bones.”
    Coming from Sharon, who had certainly spent years studying her own sad bones in the mirror, this compliment thrilled me. If anybody knew about good bones, it would be the woman who didn’t have them.
     
    My favorite class was called “Expressions.” Here, we gathered in a conference room and sat around a large oval table holding hand mirrors. Phillip led the class.
    “We all look at our faces every day in the mirror. When we shave, when we brush our teeth, and if we’re ladies, when we apply our makeup.” Then Phillip’s voice lowered to nearly a whisper ashe became philosophical. “But how well do we really know our faces?”
    I knew that my nose was too big and my ears were uneven, the right one slightly higher than the left. I also knew how I looked when I gave a blow job because I’d done it with a banana in front of a mirror.
    “You need to know exactly how your face looks when you make any facial expression.”
    All my years of staring at myself in the mirror had, at this moment, paid off. All along, I’d been doing my homework for this moment.
    Then he instructed us. “Look into your mirrors.”
    First we all glanced at each other nervously. There was some soft laughter. It was weird to be sitting in a room full of people and then stare into a hand mirror. But that’s what I did.
    “Okay, smile,” Phillip said. “And as you do, watch the different stages of the smile. As your lips begin to move up at the corners and then a little higher and then a little higher. When you’re in front of the camera, the photographer is going to expect you to be in complete control of your facial expressions. He’s going to say ‘a little less smile,’ and you’re going to know what ‘a little less’ means.”
    For an hour and a half we smiled.
    When I began raising my eyebrows, first my right then my