Gia’s Guest Post on Post-Mortem

/ Leave a Comment / Colorado, Comedy, News, Writing

What a treat to be a guest writer on Emi Nietfeld's fabulous Post-Mortem!

In this essay, I dissect the best worst gig I ever had, and I think you'll enjoy reading it even if you've never been hired as "talent" (please note the indignance with which this word is usually said).

I've included a couple of screencaps from the essay here. Read the whole shebang over on Substack.

Read Gia's Entire Essay
Guest Post-Mortem: The Best Worst Gig I Ever Had Below is a photo of Gia circa 2003. She sits on a checkerboard settee in a red halter top dress with a keyhole cutout.
The Joy of Youthful Naivete Having done stage, commercials, and print modeling as a kid, I thought that, by the time I turned 18, I knew pretty much everything there was to know about The Biz. Or at least everything about The Biz in Denver in the early 2000s. So when my agent rang on my parents’ landline to say I’d booked a promotional modeling job for Nestlé at Breckenridge Ski Resort, I thought I’d be doing some sort of stock photo or video shoot where I’d be nibbling on Toll House Cookies or sipping Nescafe. Then I saw the wardrobe provided by the client—a headband with wilted kitty ears and a tail tethered only by a flimsy piece of elastic, both to be worn over snow gear—and I realized this was not the gig I expected. As I trekked through the blustery conditions to meet my contact at the foot of the mountain, a massive, yellow, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade-sized balloon of Tidy Cats cat litter rose from the horizon.
A giant yellow back of Tidy Cats cat litter.
In front of the balloon lay a garden-height lattice barricade filled with three inches of - you guessed it - litter. The contact smiled and eagerly waved me and the other two “Kitty Girls” inside the box and, with absolutely no sense of irony, handed us each a plastic pooper scooper. Our job? To serve up clay-dusted PowerBars to executives before hitting the slopes during their corporate retreat. That’s when I learned that Tidy Cats and PowerBar are both subsidiaries of Nestlé and that “promotional model” is a fancy way to say “brand ambassador.” Was standing in a human-sized cat box for three days in the Colorado winter worth it? Yup. Apparently, my self-worth had a price, and it was $1,500. Keep reading at link in bio

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