(This story, or at least a version of this story, will appear in the next issue of Pink Mince. I’ll post links when it’s available. I’ve used a few paragraphs here from previous posts, so that I could create a stand-alone story about my experiences backstage at the Walter Van B show. But most of it is new.)
Strange things come to you over the internet. A couple of weeks ago I got a message on BigMuscleBear.com:
hey man - came across your profile and im helping a friend restage the walter van beirondonck show may 9th in SF at the berkeley art museum. you’d be perfect to be in the show - its all muscle bears modeling. should be a lot of fun – the team is coming from antwerp. cheers!
Walter Van who? I followed a couple of links and watched a bunch of bears dressed in funny pastels lumber up and down a runway in Paris.
I have a complicated relationship with the whole bear thing. I like to think I’m above labels (I mean, we all went to high school, we all grew up on John Hughes movies). Even my profile on Big Muscle Bears points out that I prefer to be called a “dingo.”
And yet underneath this thin veneer is another very thin veneer. Someone called me a muscle bear – me, the guy who came to college an inch shy of six feet and weighing 128 pounds soaking wet. That was 65 pounds ago, but some things, like high school, stick with you.
About Walter’s clothes: let’s be honest. They’re ridiculous. Cartoonish. I couldn’t see the point of dressing up bears in clothes they would never wear and marching them around the lobby of the Berkeley Art Museum. But then high fashion is a foreign culture to me. I live in laid-back San Francisco, where my only stab at fashion is switching out my Levi’s with Diesel. But like any gay dude familiar with reality television, I know that models don’t get to choose the clothes. Zip your lip, put it on, and make it look pretty.
Aside from a lingering prepubescent need for attention (oh, like you don’t have one, too) I had other reasons for accepting the (unpaid) musclebear model invitation. I’m less adventurer than homebody, so I tend to lack for raw writing material. I figured, looking back, I’d feel more regret if I turned down the invitation than if I accepted it. Plus I’d been racking up a few months of job-related rejections, and my ego needed soothing.
So I went along for the ride.
As news of the model scouting spread through my circle of friends, a kind of guarded anxiety took hold. The prospect of being picked was impossible to take seriously. Everyone made jokes. But underneath, oh, underneath… well, that’s what this story is about.
My first clue of trouble came with the fitting. That’s what they called it, in the beginning, when the Walter crew was still a few bears short. But as the days ticked down the “fitting” day was changed to “casting” day. We’d have to audition; a sure thing turned into one big maybe.
So I showed up for the casting, at a clothing shop in Hayes Valley, with two voice fighting in my head: “Just a goofy fashion show” battled with “Please deem me worthy.” Head versus heart, ego versus id. Big Mike versus Little Mike. I am not proud of the anxiety, the vanity, the keening insecurity, but to tell you otherwise would be to lie.
So both Mikes met Walter, a burly Belgian bear of a man, who shook my hand warmly. A casting girl asked if I could take off my shirt for a picture. Walter and his assistant looked me over, murmuring to each other in a language I was glad at the time not to know. They had me walk up and down the length of the shop, then huddled together with a binder full of photos from his Spring 2010 line, glancing between me and the photos.
“Would you be willing to come back in underwear?” Walter asked.
“Um,” I said, picturing myself walking down Hayes Street in nothing but briefs. “What do you mean, ‘come back?’”
He apologized for his English. “For the finale. Twenty of the models will come back to the runway in underwear. Some do not want.”
No doubt the wise ones. “Sure,” I said. Another assistant led me away to change into a lime green poncho, t-shirt, and cargo pants, with brightly colored sneakers 18 sizes too big for me. I was led back to Walter, who nodded his approval. The casting girl took my photo and then handed me a sheet of paper with directions to the museum.
“So I’m in?” I asked. She nodded.
Relieved, I drove home and wasted no time letting the online world know about it, in suitably self-deprecating terms. “Who can resist a supermodel musclebear in a lime green poncho?” I asked. “Absolutely no one, that’s who!”
On Sunday I made my way to the museum across the bay. Walter’s crew had set up an impromptu back stage on a loading dock. I like to think I’m at least somewhat unique in appearance, a misconception that became clear the moment I opened the door and found thirty-seven bearded men looking back at me. In the week before the show I’d compromised my usual look, by growing my beard longer than usual, to better my chances at casting. To better fit in. And now, well, I fit.
I joined the guys, a few of whom I knew. Below us, lining the dock’s bay, stood rolling racks of Walter’s pastels. Beside us on a bulletin board hung all of our pictures in the order we’d walk. I noted with amusement my number: 13. Underneath some photos were handwritten notes: “Underwear OK,” or “Haircut.” At the end of the loading dock worked a hair stylist. Next to him a make-up girl began to brush the shine from 38 foreheads. I noted with relief that my page was not marked with “haircut.” The Manly Fireplug would have put the stylist down like an old dog.
We spent the next hour or so waiting in a stairwell between runway run-throughs around the museum’s lobby, its space dominated by an enormous orange sculpture, whose edges we skirted in time to a loud thumping beat. “Faster, please,” an assistant murmured to me. At one point Walter appeared in the stairwell. “That was good. But please this time try not to look like you are being punished.” In between runs we told each other to smile with our eyes.
Afterwards the underwear models had a separate rehearsal. Walter appeared again in the stairwell. “We have bags of cotton balls,” he said. “When it comes time to change you may stuff them down the front of your briefs.”
The models cheered.
“But please, tasteful amounts. The Paris models – they got carried away.”
Back in the loading dock the first few bears changed into the pastels, aided by a small pack of dressers, slender black-clad juniors from the local fashion school, who attended to the naked burly men with admirable professionalism. I wondered if, when signing up, they had expected to come so close to so much back hair.
Three women with pink bakery boxes pushed through the crowd. Some bear yelled “DONUTS!” and, fearing for my life, I ducked out of the stampede’s path. Frankly I was starving, having come straight from a softball game. But I’d been working hard at losing my gut and feared – irrationally, yes – that a single donut would swell my waist during the underwear march. As a gay dude I thought I knew poor self-image, but high fashion modeling was like an advanced placement course in anorexia.
Next to me a friend peered at the bulletin board. “There’s a name here,” he said. “Crossed out.” Under the black marker I could just make out the name of one of his friends, a guy who, my friend whispered to me, had just expressed his anger at the Walter crew in a Facebook post. He’d been cast, then replaced at the last moment.
All day similar whispers had floated around backstage of other friends. Facebook and blog posts, tweets complaining about the way they’d been treated by Walter and the casting folks. Disorganization may have been inevitable – curators and PR folks had taken over the job of model scouting. The casting requirements had been vague and poorly relayed. One announcement – which I’d never received – called only for guys over six feet and 200 pounds. Guys scouted by the casting people online, guys told they’d be perfect for the show, took time off from work to come to Hayes Valley, where they were quickly dismissed as too short. Too thin. Too smooth. Guys pushed onto roller coasters – cast, then fired, then cast again.
All of this par for the course in the world of fashion. Certain jobs – modeling, acting, writing – come with rejection. It’s the contract you sign when you pursue that work. But the men scouted for the Walter show were not models; they were “real men” from the “real world:” software developers, bartenders, ad men. The problem with casting guys from the real world is that they come with real world feelings. Guys who – unlike me – called themselves bears and cubs without a trace of irony, who’d found a home in the beer busts and backyard barbecues of the furry crowd. Guys now told they weren’t quite bear enough.
Here in San Francisco fashion culture had collided with bear culture, and these guys were the roadkill. “Get over it,” you could say. “It’s just a stupid fashion show.” Oh but underneath. Who among is immune to the pain of rejection– whose soul wasn’t forged in the howling gymnasiums, bitter playgrounds, and drunken keggers of our pasts?
These guys – some of them my friends – clouded my thoughts, as if someone had thrown Walter’s pastels into the wash with a bunch of darks. In the two days between casting and runway, I’d had time to measure my growing discomfort, and to mull my complicity. Was I condoning all of this, by taking part?
The relentless focus on appearances was wearing me down. I wanted to get back to my little life, back to words, which I could rearrange on my own, putting forth an image – a self – I could control.
I dressed while an assistant stuffed paper into the toes of my clown shoes. I pushed cotton balls down the front of my briefs and closed my eyes while the make-up girl blotted my face. I pulled up my cargo pants and Walter adjusted the cuffs. I tugged at the lime green poncho.
We lined up, and the music began. The lobby was packed with fashion folks, fashion students, and friends of the models. Some of whom no doubt had been deemed “not quite right” for the runway. I had expected the quiet reserve of the runway audiences I’d seen on television, but as we marched down the ramp the crowd roared. They cheered for our goofy spectacle, for the cartoon clothes, for their friends.
The show flew by. Backstage the dressers ripped off our clothes in time for the underwear finale. We pulled up our socks and patted our guts. We checked our postures. And we marched out, half-naked, into the void.
I felt liberated. Once you’ve walked around a crowded museum in cartoon briefs, nothing can stop you.
We circled the lobby, raw, uncovered, acting braver than we really felt. Cheered on by bears and cubs and wolves and otters. Guys who’d showed up for their friends, wanting to be bigger-hearted than they really felt. Dingos and twinks and art fags. Guys with bald spots and bad tattoos. Guys in flannel, guys in black. Guys with day jobs and no jobs and unspoken dreams. Guys who thought they’d left all that behind. Guys cut down the middle between scared boy and grown man. All of us, I mean to say. All of us crashing the show.
So yeah, I’ve been dragging my feet, thinking it was presumptuous of me to create an author page on Facebook before I even finished my first book, that memoir I’ve been working on.
