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catch a plane back to Chicago but before he left he told us we should probably think about finding an agent to represent us. We liked the idea of having an agent, someone who could get us parts in movies and who couldarrange to pick us up in limousines and take us anywhere we wanted to go. ‘An agent looks out for your interests,’ Rick said. We said we wanted Rick to be our agent because he seemed to be looking out for us but he told us no, he wasn’t an agent, but he’d try to find someone to represent us. Maybe we’d see him in a month or so, he said. Goodbye, girls, he said. He looked sad.
    Daisy’s mom could get us tickets to fly for free, and when Daisy’s brother Chuck called from New York and said he wanted us to be in a film he was making, her mom came through with two roundtrip tickets. Chuck is Daisy’s identical twin. He’s a film student at NYU and Daisy loves him like a brother.
    Neither of us had ever been to New York City before, even though we’d seen it on TV (we love
Letterman
). Our plane tipped its wing and the black night outside the window was suddenly lit with a million lights so bright we thought we were landing on the moon. Daisy said, Look, there’s the Empire State Building and I followed her finger towards the skyscraper lit yellow.
    Chuck met us at LaGuardia and we got a cab into Manhattan. Chuck lives in the West Village and the cab driver let us off right where Sally let Harry off in
When Harry Met Sally
, at the Washington Square arch. ‘You were the only person I knew in New York,’ I said as the cab drove away and Daisy laughed.
    Chuck’s roommate, Bertrand, was a film major, too. Bertrand was a lot older than Chuck. He said he had four degrees already: a bachelor’s in creative writing and anotherbachelor’s in philosophy; he also had an MFA from Vermont College in poetry as well as a Ph.D. in American history from a college he kept calling Ball State. He had another year to go at NYU. Daisy asked him why he had so many degrees and he said, I have to stay in school until I get my big break so I can pay off all my student loans. Plus, he said, you get all the great connections in school.
    Where Chuck wanted to be a director, Bertrand wanted to be a screenwriter. Together they were working on Chuck’s student film,
Plastic Fantastic
, which is also the name of Chuck’s all-time favorite Flesh for Lulu album. Chuck and Bertrand’s friends were helping on the film. A girl named Chloe, a sociology junior from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, was playing the lead, a girl whose name was also Chloe and who was also from Mississippi and was also a sociology major at NYU. Chloe’s friend in the movie was a character named Melinda, whose name was really Melba. She was a film major too and me and Daisy suspected she was Chuck’s or Bertrand’s girlfriend, we couldn’t tell which. The film took place inside this New York night club called XOXO in the movie but was really called The Cellar. It was in the meatpacking part of Manhattan. Bertrand knew the owner who let us film while the bar was open. Me and Daisy played friends of Chloe and Melinda’s at the club and the movie was about how men see women in bars and, as Bertrand explained, ‘how that translates to life.’ We liked Chloe and Melinda a lot so it was easy to act like we were their friends. Chuck said it was okay if our characters were named Paque and Daisy, so we went with that.
    Because the owner was letting us film in his bar, Chuckhad to give the owner’s son Jeff a part so Chuck made Jeff one of a series of assholes who were to appear throughout the film. In the scene at The Cellar me and Daisy are dancing together and Jeff comes up and starts dancing with us and we innocently dance him into our circle. But when the song is over and me and Daisy have said thanks, Jeff won’t let us alone and he harasses us out of the club, onto the