My new summer interns just started at Washington Life and already I think they could ID half the socialites in the city. What an amazing (pointlees) skill to have! We have really been lucky at WL with our interns and I count so many of them as friends who I really enjoy watching leave the college nest and storm the real world. I have no doubt this new crop – Kate, Lauren, and Macey – will prove to be just as fabulous.
Growing up in DC, I had a heck of a lot of internships. I once had one where my boss brought me a sponge and asked me to clean out the mold from the office fridge. I swear I could have created a 100 doses of penicillin with all the spores in that refrigerator. I should have been handed a lawn mower instead of a sponge to whack through it all. I also once had to put together a 100 page PowerPoint presentation on the sewer systems in Belgium. To this day I remember nothing except that I used the colors black and yellow for my theme. Maybe it’s those incidents that really makes me appreciate my interns. It’s good we all have a little pain sometimes then we can try to remember not to inflict it on others.
So welcome Kate, Macey, and Lauren. We promise to appreciate the hell out of you (since we are paying you in bylines and celeb meet and greets) and throw ridiculous costume parties. My advice to you: learn the difference between an em dash and an en dash and stay away from Adrian Grenier, he’s a perv.
It’s that time at Washington Life where we bid adieu to our spring interns and bonjour to our summer ones. We had an amazing group of girls this time – Dina, Carley, Ali, and Ansley – and I am just not sure if I am mentally tough enough to transition to new girls for summer. Dina’s last day was today and she so sweetly wrote Kelly and I these beautiful cards and gave us bags full of presents from CUSP. Of course, we should be the ones showering her with gifts. As a grad student at Georgetown, her writing was at the next level and Kel and I loved having her pretty much just write our pieces for us as we dealt with crying socialites.
Dina and all the other great interns who have come through our doors at WL are so utterly responsible it almost intimidates me. I remember sitting at Vassar graduation hungover as all hell after three hours sleep thinking “oh no…was I supposed to apply for a job?” It took me a few years after I had my diploma in hand to finally get one. But my interns all take classes, intern three days a week, write for their school papers, run their sororities, blog, vlog, and still manage to be incredibly fun and motivated. They’re amazing. Some have gotten jobs already and others are still looking and it seems no one is going the Karin Tanabe route where they fly to a foreign country and ignore reality for several years to be a hobo.
So to all the interns I have been lucky enough to work with who graduated this week – Megan, Georgia, Ali, Allison, Kara, Ansley, and Dina – congratulations! The world awaits and it will be a much more fabulous place with you all in it.
Carley on the left and Dina on the right holding down the fort at a recent fashion shoot. We had such a great group this semester - I'm so sad to see them go!
Oh, the emotion from the women’s ice skating long program! I can barely write this post! I’m just so happy for Kim Yu-Na who had the weight of South Korea on her bony shoulders. Thank god she won gold! And I’m also thrilled that the Japanese girl who landed three triple axels in this Olympics won silver and the Canadian who just lost her mother medaled too. I couldn’t have penned a better ending!
As I knew it was going to be a very high drama event, one I simply couldn’t emerge sane from alone, Georgia, Ali, Kelly and I decided to join forces and watch the final skate together, in suitable costumes of course. We also brought my four foot sock monkey into the mix, and soon learned that he makes an exceptional ice skating partner. So light on his feet!
While Georgia, who has the BMI of, well, a figure skater, was able to find a real ice skating costume in the kid’s aisle at Costco, the rest of us were left to our own devices. Luckily Craig had been kind enough to present me with an Olympic t-shirt and matching teddy bear at the start of these Olympic games. I paired the fetching combination with red Larry Bird-inspired booty shorts, cowboy boots and an Apollo Ohno-like headband. Ali instead went Team USA in her classic cheerleader uniform, purchased somewhat intoxicated during snowmageddon, and Kelly went rogue as a half sailor, half beach-goer.
We managed to all compete together in some homemade events, like the four woman one monkey bobsled, and ate enough empty calories and processed cheese to kill a fine-tuned Olympian. We also decided that we were going to start curling and revolutionize Team USA in 2014. If we can get them to adopt sassier uniforms that is. I’m counting down the days already – only 1,460 left to learn the sport, train, and win the gold!
Most. Amazing. Picture. Ever.
Here we are competing in the bobsled. Mr. Nelson the monkey is a great leader and teammate.
Team USA! Look for us in 2014 when we dominate curling.
One more of these priceless gems. Here you can even see Georgia's skating costume bought in the children's aisle of Costco.
At 6:30 this morning I woke up with a start wearing full makeup and half my pajamas. A sudden panic came over me. One, I was so hungover I thought I might perish. Two, I didn’t remember if I had finished my blog post. In the three months that Stacey and I have been writing Naked Thanks, I have written after midnight mass, after coming home on new year’s eve, and yes, slightly intoxicated. But never had I tried to finish a post so inebriated that I barely knew my own name.
I rushed to my computer and saw that I had published gobbledegook. Random sentences not even put together in a paragraph about one of my best friends. Plus, I had scanned five pages from my camp journal. No one wants to read five pages about me making out with Dean Herger behind cabin 11. I deleted all but one journal page, made the entry as good as I could with whiskey shots still coursing through my veins and passed out for three more hours.
Now how on earth did I find myself in this irresponsible state? Two open bars and trance music.
The day started so well. I slept 1o hours, I went to the gym, and gussied myself up for the Washington opera’s mid-winter ball, a very very civilized affair. And I had the composure to match. Two drinks and not one shimmy. But then came a young donors event in Adams Morgan and my common sense decided to stay at the opera.
I drank like it was my very first college party. I drank my interns under the table. I then went to Steak and Egg diner and ate enough calories to double my body weight in one evening (This actually might have happened because this morning I broke a chair when I sat in it.) Craig announced that he should hold my arm because I might fall on the ice and then he proceeded to fall on his butt. We were a disaster. But I’ve learned my lesson. I’m no Jack Kerouac. Liquor and blogging are a painful combination.
This is pretty much what I looked like at 2 am while scarfing melted cheese and lard.
Thanks to snowverkill 2010, all of Washington D.C. has shutdown. Our own government has decided to go lounge around on tropical islands and declared the snowplow outlawed in our fair city. But I have had a fashion shoot scheduled for today since December and I was not about to change it, even if Washington is one big skating pond. So after about 30 phone calls and a mild heart attack yesterday, the wonderful army that it takes to put a seven page fashion editorial together agreed to brave the weather and go ahead with our shoot.
Things did not start well. It took one of the models 4.5 hours to drive in from Baltimore. Our stylist James was almost run over by Barack Obama’s motorcade. The museum guards were irked because we kept forgetting that hairspray and Rembrandts don’t go together. But in the end, it turned out to be one of the most fabulous shoots we have ever done. As everything at the Corcoran museum was cancelled, we had our run of the place. So we draped our models in couture gowns and just ignored the fact that the city was slowly becoming a slushy parking lot as the hours ticked by.
Frankly the photographers, stylists, models, and museum folk that I work with could have just told my shoot to go suck it and lounged about on their couches all day like the rest of this snow-fearing town. But they are tougher, more reliable, and waaay better dressed than the bureaucrats so maybe just maybe a magazine will be made this month after all!
It takes a village. Three people on hair plus a makeup artist and two stylists for one photo. But what a photo!
It’s nice to have enormous marble stairs to just kick it on during blizzards.
The Washington Life dream team braves the snow! We have done so many crazy photo shoots that waltzing to a museum while all government employees sat at home and counted our tax dollars didn't seem like such a big deal.
Georgia was my intern at Washington Life and is one of the most entertaining people I have ever shared an office/4 ft x 4 ft cell with. We spent most of our days playing our favorite game called “who can find the weirdest thing on the internet.” Some of Georgia’s great finds were Dazzler the 1220 pound Nebraskan pig and poodles transformed into camels.
But of course, since we toiled at a luxury lifestyle rag, there was also an alarming amount of in depth research about today’s pressing issues to be done like “history of elitist girls boarding schools,” “how to become a professional ballerina in your twenties,” and “world’s oldest dogs reclining on mink rugs.” A shared passion for the absurd was something that brought us together, as was an obsession with manicures and why our parents didn’t send us to Miss Porter’s School for Girls.
The wonderful thing about my Washington Life interns is that they’re fun as hell and I count them all as good friends after their free labor is done. But I also get to see them become great writers. Everything Georgia scribbles makes me cackle until I start cursing her for the formation of future laugh lines. I can’t wait to watch her start a writing career and make the same crap money as I do for the love of the pen. She’s going to be a star.
I like Georgia for many reasons and her very low BMI and yen for luxury products are only two of them.
Georgia is a champion for safety, as you can see by this slightly crazy letter she wrote to her high school field hockey coach. I don't tell her when I do things like play in traffic or practice my Cirque de Soleil moves in parking lots.
I happen to have the very best interns in Washington. Not only do they work ridiculously hard for free, but they provide me with endless entertainment and a very deep cultural knowledge of college life. While captioning photos of the District’s highfalutin folks and researching articles on inherited wealth, they assure me that you can still accidentally light your hair on fire while sucking face and still laugh about it the next day while copyediting.
All of them–Georgia, Ali, Megan, Ashley, and Allison–are amazing writers and remind me so much of myself when I was in my early 20s…except way more mature, put together, and less likely to get arrested.
Sometimes they have to do incredibly mundane tasks like spaming PR people, or writing down sku numbers for zillion dollar merchandise, which is a shame because I’m sure they all have a Pulitzer Prize in their futures. I probably doll out horrible advice to them all day; tidbits like “if you’re going to have an orgy, make sure to establish a safety word,” but hopefully they don’t really listen to me. I’m going to miss them terribly when they move on to more lucrative endeavors but am thrilled I got to know them all in their days at WL.
Georgia, Ali, WL Associate Editor Kelly F, Megan, Ashley, and myself at Thursday's "we love our interns" party. We are not flashing a gang sign, but WL for Washington Life magazine. So creative!
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