Shame, Shame, Shame

Entangling myself with Dollar the Psychic wasn't the only thing I did in the days after I lost my virginity. I also fell head over heels in love with Josephine Baker. And I decided to emulate her by answering an ad that was taped to the walls of Yale Station, the Yale post office.

It said that nude models were needed for "artistic photos." And that the pay was $20 an hour.

It was Christmas break, and Yale was a ghost town. I didn't have enough money to go home, plus Latin Muslim had promised that we'd spend Christmas Eve and Christmas together. So I arranged to pay $70 in rent to two of my off-campus actress friends, and I stayed in their roach-infested apartment during the two weeks that my dorm was shut down.

Christmas was spent alone, attempting with 50% success to cook a pot of greens. I didn't burn them, but they didn't taste all that good. I washed them down with ambrosia and a box of chocolate-covered cherries.

And with nothing else to do, I read. Stanislavski. And a book about Josephine, a black girl who ran off to Paris at age 19 and became the biggest star in Europe, the "most photographed girl in the world." And the most consistently naked, best known for dancing topless in a skirt made out of bananas.

Wow. That was some nerve.

Is that what it took to become famous?

My "artistic photo" day dawned a few days after Christmas. I arrived at the shoot with a huge triangle-shaped burn on my face, courtesy of kissing my right temple with my Golden Hot curling iron.

My photographer was a weaselly-faced graduate student, possibly black, possibly Latino. I later learned he had also "artistically photographed" at least two other black actresses I knew, who confirmed my opinion that there was nothing artistic about it.

The "set" was his bed, which had black sheets. The main prop was me. Completely nude except for a tie, artistically draped near, but definitely not covering, my crotch. And his "direction" was probably more Hustler than Playboy, with not a smidge of the coffee-table artiness I expected from his flyer.

At the end of it, I got my big $20/hour payday: a grand total of $60. And a $6-million serving of shame. I had just taken naked pictures. The kind that would come back to haunt me if I ever got rich and famous. And I'd broken my virginity vow. And my boyfriend had abandoned me on Christmas. And according to Dollar, I was cursed with Jealousy.

This was the moment when I really began to think of myself as a slut.

(Virginity Diaries Part 10 of 11: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Lessons Learned 1 2 3)