Famous Read Free

available to rush to a casting call. New York is my home, but it feels like the past. LA looks more and more like my future. And now that I’ve become friends with Willow and have met all theseother stars through her, it would be an easy transition, except for
    1. Losing Nasim, which will break my heart.
    2. My mother, who predicted I’d want to stay out here and will throw an “I told you so” fit the size of Mount Olympus. Dad will be cool with it. He understands. You do what you have to do for your career. If you don’t, someone else will and you’ll miss your opportunity.
    I sit up. Is it my imagination, or is the light from outside brighter than on past days? Maybe my eyes are overly sensitive because I’m semiseriously sleep deprived? Whatever the reason, I turn away from the window and look at the bare off-white bedroom walls. I am in the back of Willow’s pink twenty-three-room Mediterranean-style palazzo, which once belonged to Madonna. And, before that, to Barbra Streisand. I wonder how many of my classmates know who Barbra Streisand is. Or the owner before her, Lana Turner. Who? Only the biggest movie starlet of the 1950s.
    Funny how this mansion has been owned by a series of super famous (in their time) Hollywood starlets, all of whom had major difficulty with relationships.
    I tug my fingers through the rat’s nest that is my hair and get caught on a knot. Lying on the floor are my new Manolos, red alligator pumps that cost more than most cameras and are without question the most beautifulshoes ever to embrace my ugly feet. How could I refuse when Willow insisted on buying them for me?
    Wait a minute. . . . Speaking of cameras, where’s my Nikon? Oh my god! Where’s my camera?
    New York Weekly
THE YOUNGEST PAPARAZZO
    The last bell rings, and the academic day at the exclusive downtown Herrin School is officially over. Jamie Gordon’s friends leave for their after-school activities—music, dance, gymnastics, chess. Jamie, fifteen, a ninth-grader, heads for a different sort of after-school activity—one that involves hanging around outside a restaurant on Seventeenth Street in Chelsea, waiting with a dozen other paparazzi to see if Gabrielle Bloom, the star of the HBO series Tugboat Annie, will emerge with her new boyfriend, investment banker David Balkan.
    If they do, Jamie will do her best to get the money shot.
    Other parents have to pay for their children’s after-school activities, but so far this year, Jamie has grossed close to $3,000. Her celebrity photos have appeared in half a dozen magazines as well as on numerous websites. She is universallyregarded as the youngest paparazzo New York has ever seen.
    â€œI really don’t like being called a paparazzo,” Jamie said on a recent afternoon while she waited with her fellow photographers on the sidewalk outside Chez Toi, where a tipster had said Bloom and Balkan were dining. “I consider myself a celebrity photographer.”
    While some might argue that she’s splitting hairs, most of the photographers who work alongside Jamie say that she displays uncommon poise and professionalism for someone so young.
    â€œHonestly, I’m amazed by the quality of her work,” said photo agent Carla Harris, who reps Jamie’s photos to the media. “A lot of people assumed that those shots of Tatiana Frazee were just luck. But the work Jamie’s done since then has convinced me that she’s both committed to this business and has the talent to succeed in it.”
    While none of Jamie’s recent shots have equaled the now infamous photos of the supermodel Frazee losing her composure in a Soho coffee shop, Harris says that Jamie has been tenacious and consistent in her production of celebrity pictures.
    â€œNo one hits a home run every time,” said Harris. “Jamie’s okay with hitting singles and doubles. And that means that sooner or later she’ll probably