If you work full-time remote as I do, maybe you’ve grown accustomed to the irksome Zoom environment so essential to calls and meetings. (I use ‘Zoom’ here generically like ‘Kleenex’ to describe the many platforms—Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack Huddle—our marketing agency relies upon to conduct bidness depending on client preferences and time constraints and who’s got access to the paid versions and such.) Aside from the unavoidable tech glitches that affect call quality, these platforms are all equally hostile environments for the human form. Which is to say, they don’t know how to get our “good” side, not even close.

I was having this conversation last Saturday with one Brownie Harris, an acclaimed professional photographer who happens to live here in my coastal North Carolina hometown. Who knew. In fact I might not’ve known had I been paying less attention to the local news guy blathering on the telly a couple weeks back. The name “John Kennedy” caught my ear, so I watched. Turns out Brownie snapped some famous photos of him, the younger JFK who was killed in a plane crash—you might even have seen the magazine cover. He’s also snapped some famous photos of, well, so many famous people. If you followed the link above and hopped over to his website, you’ll know instantly I speak truth.

Turns out the local news media were interested in talking to Brownie because of the upcoming publication of a book three years in the making, a retrospective of his storied life as a photographer. But it also got me wondering whether he would consider a gig as banal as snapping a professional headshot of someone like moi. I started searching my phone and instantly discovered, yes, he would! A few moments later, and Brownie and I were texting back and forth and negotiating about how much and when.

So last Saturday, for the first time in fifteen years, I had my headshot remade by a famous photographer.

Fifteen years ago, I had my first headshot made by another famous photographer and friend, Matt Murphy. I’d been following Matt on his blog in the two-thousand aughts during a deeply reflective moment in his life, when a relatively rare but lengthy illness had sidelined him from American Ballet Theatre’s roster. In a truly inspiring and nimble maneuver, Matt reinvented himself almost overnight as a professional photographer. I already had plans to be in NYC for teacher training at ABT around that time, so I took advantage and connected with Matt and his makeup artist to arrange a sitting. The outcome was not only one of the most memorable and enjoyable days in my life to date, but a wonderful portfolio of images I’ve been using now for more than a decade.

The key phrase there is, more than a decade. The painful truth is, I don’t look the way I did 15 years ago. Nobody at work says anything out loud about this, but until last week, my 15-years-younger self appeared in multiple online apps (including that Zoom screen that pops up in meetings ‘til you click on the camera) to say nothing of our company website. If you visit our About page now, you’ll see the updated image, a bit hacked up by the artificial white background on the website, but still a reasonable likeness of the person I am today.

I didn’t have to travel to NYC this time. Last Saturday Carly Simon greeted me inside Brownie’s studio with her lips puckered evocatively in a kiss, strumming a guitar. Beside her Andy Warhol sat in a backward-facing chair before a colorful landscape, wearing his signature mop of platinum hair. (“He didn’t say a word during the photo shoot,” Brownie said after I asked about the experience. He went on to explain he later learned Warhol was loathe to interfere with the artistic process.) He was quick to show me images he snapped of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Twyla Tharp dancers, as we’d already talked about my life immersed in ballet.

The shoot lasted about an hour. I came prepared with a few changes of clothing, along with several options in jewelry. A couple days earlier I had visited Brownie’s lovely daughter at Sephora to find the right “non-oil-based makeup” per his advice. “Oil-based makeup will make you look like you’re sweating,” he warned me. (A few days later, a text: the editing process had been “a joy because you didn’t wear oil base makeup. You are the first woman to listen to me about makeup.” A distinction I now hold!)

I forgot how tough it is to sit for photos, but I do follow instructions well. And on this occasion, an added dimension: a toddler ‘helper’ with the most impossibly gorgeous angelic face and ringlets of hair surrounding it, terribly shy at first, but too curious to stay that way long. His presence in the studio made my job of answering the “bigger smile” mandate so much easier.

Insofar as the ‘Zoom’ environment, Brownie conceded, “it’s awful. Get one of those ring lights.” Maybe I will. In the end, they’re just work meetings and I doubt too many people care, but I think maybe it matters a skosh more when you come from the performing arts. Or maybe it is just vanity plain and simple, who knows.

Brownie definitely got my good side, and now I can relax into being my authentic self online, among my coworkers and our clients. Next up is a book-signing event for the May 1^st release of Brownie Harris Retrospective: 1970–2020.

A word to Certain Family Members: maybe hold off buying for now. Christmas is coming.