When a model mom says,
“Those will be some great tears!” she’s not referring to a future bout of
crying. She means tear-sheets, as in,
tearing a page out of a newspaper or magazine.
Way back when I was in high school (which was apparently A REALLY LONG
TIME AGO because that age-guessing app that’s gone viral said I appeared
EIGHTY-FIVE YEARS OLD) my mom managed an advertising department at a newspaper
publishing group. One summer I was
cobbling together some babysitting and other part-time jobs, and they just
happened to have a need for help in their tear-sheet room. Enter me; in need of work and relatively responsible,
I got hired to clean up the tear-sheet room.
I am probably the only model mom who has actually had a job handling
tear-sheets…and truthfully,today most tear sheets are not actually sheets any more
but screen shots. (Which kind of makes
for a sad book, or portfolio, of a model’s work.)
Anyway, the job in the
tear-sheet room had been unfilled for a while, and there was a massive backlog
of tear-sheet requests. Basically, a
tear-sheet was page – torn from the newspaper – sent to advertisers to prove
that their ad actually ran in the paper and that it was what the client paid
for. A tear-sheet had to be the whole
page of the newspaper, because it needed to include the title and date of the
publication. A local business might just
want one or two tear-sheets, whereas a car dealership, perhaps, might want
several; one or two for the dealership’s own records and maybe a few to send
directly to Toyota, say, to account for the corporate advertising piece. Tear-sheets in that sense were basically
receipts, and as part of the advertising purchase, customers could request as
many as they wanted. That meant a seventeen-year-old
would sit in a fluorescently-lit inner-room in a building that once housed a
grocery store, listening to the local classic rock mega station (the only thing
that would come in on the radio; two-fer Tuesdays were definitely the best)
barely covering up the repetitive din of the printing presses, getting blackened
fingers from pulling ads from inky newspapers and stuffing them into manila
envelopes. And addressing them by
hand. This is like, the epitome of any
job that has been long-since eliminated by the “information superhighway.” (Incidentally, so has the publishing company;
that building is now a Chinese Golden Buffet and the newspapers have been bought
up by the few remaining dailies in larger markets and now probably merit an
article or two in online coverage. I get
my hometown news from a Facebook page now.
Wow, I’m totally depressing myself…)
“Good tears” are
fantastic images of our kids with clear, happy expressions and cool clothes. Ideally, a great brand will be attached to
the picture as well. Sun-kissed hair, seersucker
and madras…running on the beach in the Hamptons for Ralph Lauren? Great tear.
Pajamas and a dog for a Hanna Andersson Christmas catalog? Great tear.
Tiny picture of a hooded towel for a discount chain? Not really a great tear. Happy for the job, don’t get me wrong…but
that one is folded up in its original weekly flyer in the back of my daughter’s
book. Great tears, incidentally, can
lead to more great bookings. Our agent
likes to use tears for submissions. Kids
who have a great set of tears may not need an assortment of professional
pictures for modeling submissions because agents can submit tear-sheet photos
to clients and clients can see what the kids look like at work. (Some agents still want their kiddos to have
great pro-pics, that way the agents can really have their say about how the kid
is presented to a client. That’s cool,
too. If your agent operates that way,
AND IS NOT REQUIRING YOU TO PURCHASE PICS FROM THE AGENT, that’s fine…it’s all
agency preference.)
Finding tears of your
kids can be remarkably fun OR excruciatingly frustrating. It’s definitely one of the cool parts of the
job. Your kid goes to a photo shoot and
a few months later, you start stalking websites and stores and social media
looking for your kid. If you find some
that you love, YIPEE! Sometimes you will
find one of your kid with a goofy smile.
Or in a group shot with six other kids, half cut off. Or maybe just your kid’s legs. Sometimes you won’t find one at all…and that
can be especially frustrating if the shoot was for a really cool company and
your kid went away on location and shot at an amazing botanical garden with
fabulous shrubbery sculptures…but I digress.
If you find the pics, you then need to figure out how to get
high-quality images from the internet (hard, but necessary if you want to print
one for the book), show up at the store to see if your kid is on any coupons or
flyers (Oshkosh and Carter’s, for example, shoot a good number of kids and they
can end of on myriad possibilities of marketing paraphernalia), and hope that
your friends who are on the mailing lists can put stuff aside for you. Model-moms are famous for carrying around a
ton of magazines, catalogs and flyers in their mom-bags to distribute as they
see moms who may need them. It’s like a
fun little scavenger hunt. (I've shared our "first" and "worst" below!) When we get
good ones, we share and “ooh” and “aaah” together, and when we get the turned-around/hoodie-over-the-face
shoot, we laugh about it. Sort of.
Just a follow up on the
pageant world: some moms provided me with a little more information about
pageants. There are two types of
pageants: glitz and natural. Glitz is
the type we associate with Jon-Benet: the hair and makeup along with the
beyond-beyond-beyond clothing. Natural
is more like dressing up but keeping to the “real” girl: no wigs or heavy
makeup. For the older girls – say, ten
and up – I saw a few pics this past weekend,
and they looked like they were dressed for a very special occasion, like maybe
prom (back in the good old days, before girls started wearing nothing to the
prom – have I mentioned I’m a high school teacher?) with floor-length dresses,
natural makeup, and “done” but not “DONE” hair.
And these girls looked great – like they were really having a good
time. Toddlers and Tiaras seems to be more focused on the glitz world,
and thinking through my friends who do pageants, I don’t really know any glitz
moms and daughters.
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| My daughter's first... |
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| ...and the worst. |
i know that little baby!
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