Okay…so I know I didn’t get the Tiger babe shots produced in a timely fashion. And, in fact, I decided against the Tiger babe shots at all. Partly because I came to the conclusion that the Tiger babes had nothing even vaguely babelicious to aspire to for those of us whose tastes run to tasteful elegant with just a hint of real boob…not the melon sized versions on display in Vanity Fair. And, second of all, those girls are not all that hot. And they certainly have already left public consciousness.

So what I did instead was decided to take a bunch of forty somethings and some minutes away from fifty-somethings (me included) and turn us into an incredibly decent, respectable facsimile of the poster for the new Sex and the City movie. And my point is????? Here’s my point (and the reason for the title S & M….as in SMOKE AND MIRRORS, for all of you frisky minded folks…sorry to disappoint)..the point of this is that every day of our lives we spend a lot of time watching TV, looking at magazines, perusing the newspaper. And everywhere you look there are images that, consciously or subconsciously, we all compare ourselves to. Like Martha Stewarts magazine. My god. I had a Martha shoot at my house once. A team of attractive young women showed up for the Easter issue a few months in advance. Why my house? Lord knows…I believe they said that the wall colors were good…but they never mentioned the cat vomit stained rug, the boogers Luke had wiped on the perfect colored walls, the baseboard where countless balls and scooters have hammered the paint, play doh left over from days when my boys actually played with play doh, and the huge quantity of food ground into chairs, throw rugs not to mention the pets fur. The White trashiness of our abode didn’t seem to phase Martha’s girls, intrepid and perky as they were. For hours these young women slaved…dying Easter eggs, cutting out little paper ducks or some such, arranging things on tables and in windows in perfect “Martha” displays of elegance and good taste, little cans of touch up paint frantically covering the boogers and scooter dings. Their days and hours of work appeared in a small section of the magazine looking great with instructions for achieving the same effect in your own home. Yeah, right. What they never fucking mentioned was the team of pert twenty somethings spending HOURS, I kid you not, HOURS to actually get these lovely images. You couldn’t do it if you tried. Well, actually, you could do it. But it would be a full time job. No grocery shopping, no sleeping, no picking the kids up from school, forget ever putting on makeup or a matching outfit. My god, you’d have the perfect excuse for forgoing sex. “Sorry honey, I have not finished cutting out the four hundred and thirty two bunnies I have carefully stenciled onto vintage wallpaper, elegant in it’s shades of apricot and watermelon. And I still have to string them onto pastel silk thread and hang them from our balustrades for our elegant Easter display. Wish I could take a quick break for a roll, but, you know….” You’d have to spend every breathing minute achieving aesthetic perfection. I’m not even going to tell you the magazine pumpkin carving story because it will take too long. Let’s just say it involves professional pumpkin carvers working non stop, almost without sleep and food, for 48 hours to get a total of FIVE acceptable pumpkins for an unnamed magazine that was going to try to convince you that you, too, could have pumpkins that depicted the Civil Rights movement from slavery until now. Okay. That part’s made up. The 48 hours with professional, PROFESSIONAL pumpkin carvers is not. This kind of deception of hardworking women like us is everywhere, guaranteed to make us feel fatter than we should be, poorly dressed, over-sunned, and completely lacking the ability in the kitchen to turn out any sort of meal that anyone would actually want to eat let alone make paper bunnies out of vintage wallpaper or carve a fucking pumpkin . It really is the Smoke and Mirrors approach to the world. I’ve blogged about what it takes to make a star actually “go bare”. It takes great lighting and artful retouching. Even the Evening News isn’t what it seems. Katie Couric, alone behind her big desk, wearing a good suit and haircut, telling you about the days events. But if you were to widen out that shot, pull back to see what’s REALLY happening…why, there are fifty people in the room with Katie, writers, directors, cameramen. When you hit commercial breaks, the hair and makeup people rush in to eliminate any sign of effort or head movement. Katie is reading from a teleprompter something someone else wrote and there’s an earpiece in her ear to update her on any breaking news. Katie might even have her shoes off under the desk. It’s been known to happen. Or what about the food magazines? With their food stylists who carve carrots then place them gently in the inedible but beautiful lit stew “just so”, Yeah, they can show up at my house at dinner time but try placing a carrot gently in my stews and I guarantee, someone’s going to lose a hand. Photographers who make sure the light hits the beef just right and the red gel gives it that perfect stewy color. Oh yeah. In the land of the media it doesn’t just take a Village…it takes a goddamned army trained up the wazoo in the art of deception. So here’s what I did. I took four of my women friends, all very hands-on mothers of two or more kids each, all inclined more towards Teva’s than high fashion, all great looking in their own completely understated way and I TURNED THEM INTO MOVIE STARS. Actually, like all things involving “movie stars”…it was not me, it was my team. My army. Hair, makeup, great majorly talented photographer, assistant, stylist (my friend Victor who, among many other wonderful things is also a fabulous drag queen, appropriate, no? who better trained in the art of deception than beautiful drag queens. Much more to share on this one including how gaff tape can make your boobs look like a million bucks, but you’ll have to wait) cameraman, sound man, wind machines, so much make-up it took us days to chisel it off, hairspray and hairstraighteners, cheap dresses bought on credit cards at the local mall to be returned the next day (that’s how it works), a lot of coffee (and no tequilla even though we wanted to but it WAS 10 am), a lot of giggles, a lot of moral support and all before we had to drop everything and pick up kids at 2:30. We even had to come up with a quick substitute mommy model because, lo and behold, my friend Liz’s kids turned up with strep that morning, the kind that involves throw up, so we got her a back-up model, my always game friend Adrienne who had to bring her littlest one and Liz managed to come for a couple hours because, unlike real movie stars, she didn’t actually have a staff to watch the kids while she did her photo shoot. Bet that never happens to Sarah Jessica. And then, like all great movie stars, we had some retouching and final approval. And I think we ROCK. I’m not kidding. But I’m not going to show you now. You have to wait til tomorrow. But I promise. You’re going to be proud. We look, well, like MOVIE STARS.