As the years wear on and no one discovers me (I imagine a chance meeting on a BART train with an editor who looks at me and suddenly Understands that I am the next big thing, but I would also be open to meeting in a restaurant or cafe), I am toning down my goals. I don’t need to be famous myself as long as I can be surrounded by all the advantages of fame: namely, money, classy grub, and free stuff. I’ve decided that after I graduate I will become a personal assistant to someone famous. Not the kind of assistant who works fourteen hour days and is made miserable by the vagaries of a self-important popstar; no, I will be the kind who is cherished as a best friend and confidant, who is allowed to go home early or use the expensive gym membership whenever she wants, who gets all the good complimentary food baskets because the star is on a diet.
When my star discusses me with her starry friends at the catered poolside lunch we are billing to the studio (a lunch at which, of course, I am present), she will say with a little laugh “Oh, I just couldn’t do without her.” This will be a star who values my Snoopy dances and silly French accent more than she would value organizational skills or a good work ethic. “She helps me keep my sense of humor about it all when it gets really awful,” she will say with a small wave which encompasses the Hummer, the lap pool, and Juan, the handsome Salvadoran gardener with whom I had a brief kissing affair in 2007 and who the star and I make cruel jokes about now because he follows me around like a puppy. I am wearing $500 Versace sunglasses and giving sage love advice to the starry friends in between the Juan jokes that get meaner with every bloody Mary.
(I still remember the day six months ago when she gave me those glasses. They came in a big gift box from Versace with a bunch of clothes, and she spent six hours trying them on and complaining that they made her forehead look like it was bulging out under her hairline. “It looks bulgey. Doesn’t it look bulgey? God, these glasses are so great. But my forehead looks kind of bulgey, I think. Do you think so? Bulgey, right?” I encouraged her in this impression because I really needed a pair of sunglasses for our upcoming trip to Monaco.) The star winces as she adjusts one of her bandages slightly–she has recently gone under the knife of Hollywood’s premiere plastic surgeon, the one who did such a great job with Cate, to reduce the size of her bulgey forehead–and, like the stellar personal assistant I am, I considerately order another round of painkilling bloody Marys from the promisingly attractive waiter.
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