For one thing, it strikes me as vaguely denigrating to the celebrities. And I say this as someone not historically concerned with the denigration of celebrities. But the underlying message to civilians seems to be that a celebrity life is best accessed not through hard work or talent but through lottery-type luck. Their fortune is a fluke that, with a flick of the wrist, could belong to any man on the street. What a lesson. And what of us civilian participants? Are we not setting ourselves up to feel bad about our modest level of notoriety, a level with which we were perfectly comfortable just the day before? Then there’s the shame of the thrill, the tiny hope that someone famous will whip around and call you a natural, tell you they see the faint outline of your high school production of Pippin in your delivery. Is it healthy to place this much value on the celebrity gaze? We are, at best, pleased by the scraps. We are, at worst, validated by them.
These were the kinds of thoughts swirling around my head after I got the call. The prize I’d won—the chance to mingle, and for a moment be an equal, with the actors on the set of Gossip Girl—was not initially meant to be mine. Hollywood is not known for its sensitivity; I was told outright that a more famous writer had been offered the walk-on and declined. The news that someone I respected would not do what I was willing to do in a heartbeat had absolutely no effect on me. I did not slavishly follow Gossip Girl, but I certainly knew what it was. I was familiar with the premise, knew what channel it was on, and had watched parts of the first season. The show is what my grandmother used to call “good junk” because she died before the phrase “guilty pleasure” entered the lexicon. Because I was tickled by the invitation, I told myself that the famous author had clearly said no because she was unfamiliar with the show’s good-junkiness—not because she was weighing the benefits of playing a caricature of a writer and making her decision based on what a serious author should or should not do.
But when I hung up the phone, I thought: Which is what, exactly?
* * *
What’s unclear to me, even now, is how I missed the part where I would be playing myself. I knew I wasn’t being solicited for my acting skills. But I thought I’d just be a mute extra, waving stiffly while someone pulled my skateboard in slow motion across the background.
I learned otherwise when the script was e-mailed to me the night before. The episode is called “Memoirs of an Invisible Dan” and the scene is a book party thrown in honor of the book’s author, Dan Humphrey, the scruffy Brooklyn-based progeny of a former rock star and, as such, a distastefully pedigreed outsider to the Upper East Side world of Gossip Girl. Dan, because he attended an exclusive high school and dated one of its queen bees, has snuck an insider peek (thus the title of his book, meant ironically: Insider) at a life he is doomed to distantly watch. This condemnation becomes increasingly hard to swallow as the series unfolds, given Dan’s social, carnal, and claustrophobically familial connections to this cloistered world. His father marries his girlfriend’s mother. None of these ties deters him from jotting down his spiky observations. And observe he has done. After scoring a short-story publication in The New Yorker as a high school junior (a “dream on” incident of implausibility that’s become increasingly plausible in these days’ youth-prized scribes), Dan, in true Truman Capote fashion, writes a roman à clef about his tony friends and the socially stratospheric family into which his father has married. He is then embarrassed by the publication because he fears they will confuse fact and fiction, as they definitely should.
Which is where I come in. In my scene, a snappily dressed young woman playing a literary agent escorts me to a group of actors. These include Dan’s father and stepmother (Rufus Humphrey and Lily van der Woodsen, played by Matthew Settle and Kelly Rutherford) and their stepson, a dastardly but lovable peer of Dan’s (Chuck Bass, played by Ed Westwick). Chuck is the motherless son of a ruthless business scion; his broody eyebrow acting is a triumph. Gossip Girl is not so much about teenagers with grown-up problems as it is about New Yorkers with Dallas problems.
According to the script, I am to be presented in a manner reminiscent of Wikipedia: The Movie—
“And this is Sloane Crosley,” says the literary agent.
She is instructed to step aside and gesture at me before helpfully adding, “The bestselling author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake.”
Then the whole group is meant to ooh and ahh as if I had invented the cheese grater.
As one of the many people who go through life not being Bono, I was grateful for the plug. I just didn’t want to be standing right there, the camera zooming in on my face as I watched the plug enter the outlet. At a real book party, such information would be encased in a quiet murmuring and the subject would be far across the room. If at all. Talking about an author’s book at a book party isn’t quite as gauche as talking about an artist’s painting at a gallery opening, but it’s up there. What people really talk
