Round Robin, The Formative Years: Part One
Title: The First Few Minutes
Author: hawkbehere (hawkbehere@yahoo.com)
Rating: M: For cursing. No sex, sorry.
Summary: As instructed, I'm retelling the first few minutes of The Devil Wears Prada in a very serious manner.
A/N: ScaryRobot totally press-ganged me into writing the first chapter of this Round Robin. Which was as simple as asking me. I have nothing but mad love for robots, scary or otherwise, and most especially for people who design them. Thanks, as always, to the marvelous Mercurychkita for the beta. Any remaining errors are entirely mine. Back to IAR.
***
It’s arguably harder to be a beautiful girl in New York City than anywhere else in the world. NYC’s not like when you go to the mall in some smaller-ass city and look around at the schmucks walking by and suddenly feel exponentially better looking and like you really are, after all, the shit. NYC doesn’t make you feel like Mary Tyler Moore happily tossing her beret in the air because she actually truly was the shit. No no. To paraphrase the esteemed Misdemeanor professor Missy Elliott, from her masterful paean to employment (of sorts) Work It, you put your thang down, flip it and reverse it.
Andy hadn’t really gotten the memo about this when she woke up that fateful morning. [She would have if she’d seen all those hot mamis in the opening credits-but she couldn’t because she was putting together an outfit about which, maybe, her mom, (from flat-out maternal loyalty) would say “Honey, you look almost…kempt.” When the best adjective your mom can think of is kempt, you need to rethink shit. But, again, Andy was fucked ‘cause her mom was in Cincinnati and a good thing, too, because Nate was wearing a t-shirt but totally not wearing boxers under those covers. I’m so sure they’d had happy ‘you finally have a job interview’ sex the night before.]
Andy thought the next best thing to do, after choosing a bad outfit, was to get an onion bagel for breakfast. Because she was, like five or something, and didn’t understand that smelling of onions during a job interview doesn’t exactly reek of professionalism. [I personally think that fucker Nate should have gotten up, put on some boxers and fortified his woman with a good-luck-hope-you-get-a-job-so-I don’t-have-to-pull-double-shifts-forever breakfast, but that’s just me.]
As Andy entered the sort of awe-inspiring Elias Clarke building, she was anxious and hopeful. [They did the awe part with that camera angle, looking up from below-feel awe, peons!] She’d had the choice of Runway or Auto Universe but she was working under a bit of a misperception. Actually a big misperception. She thought she didn’t know much about cars but she didn’t understand she knew way fucking more about cars than fashion. In the sense that she’d actually driven a car. She’d never driven fashion.
[Look at that blazer, the cut and the color (with her skin tone?) and just know that for real. And another for real? Who cut Andy’s hair? Wait, don’t answer. I know. One of my ex-girlfriends cut her hair. I say this with love, but having that ex-girlfriend cut your hair was like letting a chupacabra cut your hair, a chupacabra whose grasp of tonsorial artistry was pretty damned limited.]
Andy’s heart rate doubled as she walked into the reception area and was met by a sort of ferocious-seeming Englishwoman named Emily, with red hair of the highly-assisted variety. Andy didn’t really notice what the woman was wearing. Of course she didn’t. Although Andy couldn’t know this as she followed Emily, she was about to get her ass handed back to her bright red and smokin’ hot. Because this was Runway and NYC and they could gleefully run you over with their non-Auto-Universe super-fashionista car, back up over you and then say, out the window, with total insouciance, “Oh, I’m sorry. You didn’t really need that self-esteem, did you?”
Andy was about to find out.
[In the meantime, as Andy was unwittingly preparing to get served, Emily was realizing that Andy was so obviously ‘wtf’ about fashion and Runway and Miranda Priestly that, if she were Laura Roslin, she’d totally have the girl sucked out of the most convenient Battlestar Gallactica airlock. No one at Runway knew Emily was actually a closeted geek of the highest magnitude and that she played WoW compulsively. They never would.]
Andy watched as Emily got some call and the woman said, “No…no..no” [although she was really thinking motherfracker!]. She told the bald guy who’d come strolling in and he immediately alerted the troops and called Andy about the onion bagel. Andy did that hand thing so she could smell her own breath [Which is something you so don’t do in a public area on your…hello! Job interview!].
Andy then watched in shock as everyone scattered. But why? It was almost as if someone had opened a canister of hydrogen cyanide or something and she didn’t know it. [Well, maybe not, Andy. It smells like bitter almonds. Not everyone can smell it. Seriously? The inability to smell bitter almonds is just one kind of dysosmia and it’s a recessive sex-linked genetic trait. Hey, I’m just sayin’.]
Anyway, it wasn’t cyanide. It was just Miranda. [There is a difference.]
Because Andy remained clueless, she didn’t know there was some serious footwear making its presence known outside and that Miranda Fucking Priestly was entering the building. [I’m sure you all noticed the cinematographer did a quick shot of Miranda from a lower angle and from the same side as a reference to the Elias Clarke building shot from just a bit earlier to make an equivalence between the two, right? It’s so obvious and 101, right? Yeah. But it made me laugh. I like my cinematic analogies in two-bite brownie size.]
So, Andy watched, with a growing sense of the anxiety that had been dispersed through the office (Or was it cyanide gas? She couldn’t smell.), as Miranda arrived.
***
Emily rushed and met Miranda at the entrance and followed her feeling like a spaniel that’d had one too many puppy spankings. Miranda was doing her Gatling gun impression. Emily sighed even as she listened, knowing that Miranda wouldn’t give a shit about her knowledge of the first true rapid-fire weapon used in American history. No-Miranda wanted attractive female paratroopers. Was that asking too much? Definitely, in Emily’s opinion. Why jump out of airplanes if you were truly attractive? How quixotic would that be?
Then she remembered. Oh God, that Andy person still existed.
Of course Miranda saw this, since (like a bloodhound) she could smell one part “something to make me want to fuck everyone up” in about a zillion parts water.
Emily tried to play it off but Miranda was in one of those moods-one of those moods she was in every single day. So Emily had to acquiesce. Of course she did. Because that was her new middle name. Which, when she’d thought about it-and shamefully she had-sounded like some fragrance ad or something: Do you want to tell that special someone just how very submissive you’re feeling? How very eager to please? Wear Acquiescence-a new exclusive fragrance for those women who are entirely whipped. A delicate mixture of bergamot, jasmine and other patented essential tones we like to call ‘Please say I did a good job,’ ‘Spank me,’ ‘Oh God, I think I actually want you to fuck me.’
Anyway, Emily shoved Andy along and snatched the satchel that matched absolutely nothing the woman was wearing out of her hands as she did so.
***
Andy was now sort of truly terrified because this Miranda woman seemed daunting with a capital De fuck?
[And at this point, because Andy wasn’t most of us, she didn’t immediately think when she looked at Miranda, “Oh, yeah. I’ll take that with a side of fries. Wait. Fuck the fries. That’s the full meal right there.” What? Oh please. No! An analogy. I didn’t mean that in a vulgar way. At all.]
The woman looked up and Andy realized she’d had guys look at her and stuff all her life but she’d never felt herself perused. First time for everything. She put her resumé on Miranda’s desk and began her spiel. Miranda wasn’t looking at her, just looking at her newspaper, and started to say this frosty cold but true shit about Andy’s total inappropriateness for the job.
[See-this is our real introduction to Miranda so she’s all Super-Bitch-And-Could-Care-Less-A-Saurus Rex. And, yeah, Andy does feel like she’s in Jurassic-Runway Park. Brontosaur-Emily pushed her in and Pterano-Bald Guy is still out there roaming around.]
Then Miranda served it up-the piping hot platter of ‘tude about Andy’s clothes. Andy looked down and the memo arrived. She only skimmed it but she got the gist. Miranda did not think Andy was all that. This was Runway and NYC and Miranda had just told her she didn’t measure the fuck up.
Andy suddenly felt exactly like she’d put her tongue on a frozen metal lamppost and it’d stuck and she was sort of anxiously talking around her trapped tongue. Which didn’t necessarily make her Candidate A for the job. When Miranda dismissed her, Andy immediately felt abashed with a capital A (not Candidate A). But her Midwest gumption (which is why Midwesterners totally rock!) couldn’t let her leave without making one last stand, around her tongue that was still fucking stuck to that lamppost.
Andy blurted out what she considered her mad skillz. And then Miranda looked at her, really looked at her. It was sort of a reptilian look. The calm, appraising look of some Fashion Empress Asp of Doom who was wondering whether she should even bother biting through that bad blazer to get to the two-bite brownie Midwesterner inside. [No. Make that three-bite, Miranda thought.]
Just then, that bald guy came in and totally ignored her and Miranda ignored her too.
Suddenly Andy’s tongue was free. Thank God! It was over. She said a lame goodbye and then walked out, suddenly realizing that at least she had driven a few cars in her lifetime and that maybe Auto Universe was a good fit, after all.
No one could have been more surprised to hear her own name called out in the lobby than Andy. She turned and saw Emily summon her-in a pretty petulant-ass way.
Job! Andy ftw!
***
[Okay. Stay tuned for next week, when you’ll see (or not!):
Andy really only skimmed the memo because she chooses an even worse outfit for her first day at work. (And she still thinks she’s all that-our heroine will need to smack her little head to wake the fuck up.)
Watch Andy take direction from Miranda the first time: It’s like seeing someone download some bootleg copy of Watchmen on a dial-up connection in her brain. Good times!
And, later, Professor Missy Elliott again offers some helpful advice, seconded by Nigel:
“If you're a fly gal, get your nails done
Get a pedicure, get your hair did.”
Yeah. It’s like that, Andy. Welcome to Runway and to the Big Apple, baby.]
Tossing the baton to our next Round Robin author, ashaelia. Heads up! Incoming!
A QUICK REMINDER!
Because this is a Round Robin, the comments you leave are not only where you tell me how awesome I am or how cosmically I suck, but also where you post suggestions for the next chapter. Tell the good ship ashaelia where you want her to go (snicker). See this post for further information!
Author: hawkbehere (hawkbehere@yahoo.com)
Rating: M: For cursing. No sex, sorry.
Summary: As instructed, I'm retelling the first few minutes of The Devil Wears Prada in a very serious manner.
A/N: ScaryRobot totally press-ganged me into writing the first chapter of this Round Robin. Which was as simple as asking me. I have nothing but mad love for robots, scary or otherwise, and most especially for people who design them. Thanks, as always, to the marvelous Mercurychkita for the beta. Any remaining errors are entirely mine. Back to IAR.
***
It’s arguably harder to be a beautiful girl in New York City than anywhere else in the world. NYC’s not like when you go to the mall in some smaller-ass city and look around at the schmucks walking by and suddenly feel exponentially better looking and like you really are, after all, the shit. NYC doesn’t make you feel like Mary Tyler Moore happily tossing her beret in the air because she actually truly was the shit. No no. To paraphrase the esteemed Misdemeanor professor Missy Elliott, from her masterful paean to employment (of sorts) Work It, you put your thang down, flip it and reverse it.
Andy hadn’t really gotten the memo about this when she woke up that fateful morning. [She would have if she’d seen all those hot mamis in the opening credits-but she couldn’t because she was putting together an outfit about which, maybe, her mom, (from flat-out maternal loyalty) would say “Honey, you look almost…kempt.” When the best adjective your mom can think of is kempt, you need to rethink shit. But, again, Andy was fucked ‘cause her mom was in Cincinnati and a good thing, too, because Nate was wearing a t-shirt but totally not wearing boxers under those covers. I’m so sure they’d had happy ‘you finally have a job interview’ sex the night before.]
Andy thought the next best thing to do, after choosing a bad outfit, was to get an onion bagel for breakfast. Because she was, like five or something, and didn’t understand that smelling of onions during a job interview doesn’t exactly reek of professionalism. [I personally think that fucker Nate should have gotten up, put on some boxers and fortified his woman with a good-luck-hope-you-get-a-job-so-I don’t-have-to-pull-double-shifts-forever breakfast, but that’s just me.]
As Andy entered the sort of awe-inspiring Elias Clarke building, she was anxious and hopeful. [They did the awe part with that camera angle, looking up from below-feel awe, peons!] She’d had the choice of Runway or Auto Universe but she was working under a bit of a misperception. Actually a big misperception. She thought she didn’t know much about cars but she didn’t understand she knew way fucking more about cars than fashion. In the sense that she’d actually driven a car. She’d never driven fashion.
[Look at that blazer, the cut and the color (with her skin tone?) and just know that for real. And another for real? Who cut Andy’s hair? Wait, don’t answer. I know. One of my ex-girlfriends cut her hair. I say this with love, but having that ex-girlfriend cut your hair was like letting a chupacabra cut your hair, a chupacabra whose grasp of tonsorial artistry was pretty damned limited.]
Andy’s heart rate doubled as she walked into the reception area and was met by a sort of ferocious-seeming Englishwoman named Emily, with red hair of the highly-assisted variety. Andy didn’t really notice what the woman was wearing. Of course she didn’t. Although Andy couldn’t know this as she followed Emily, she was about to get her ass handed back to her bright red and smokin’ hot. Because this was Runway and NYC and they could gleefully run you over with their non-Auto-Universe super-fashionista car, back up over you and then say, out the window, with total insouciance, “Oh, I’m sorry. You didn’t really need that self-esteem, did you?”
Andy was about to find out.
[In the meantime, as Andy was unwittingly preparing to get served, Emily was realizing that Andy was so obviously ‘wtf’ about fashion and Runway and Miranda Priestly that, if she were Laura Roslin, she’d totally have the girl sucked out of the most convenient Battlestar Gallactica airlock. No one at Runway knew Emily was actually a closeted geek of the highest magnitude and that she played WoW compulsively. They never would.]
Andy watched as Emily got some call and the woman said, “No…no..no” [although she was really thinking motherfracker!]. She told the bald guy who’d come strolling in and he immediately alerted the troops and called Andy about the onion bagel. Andy did that hand thing so she could smell her own breath [Which is something you so don’t do in a public area on your…hello! Job interview!].
Andy then watched in shock as everyone scattered. But why? It was almost as if someone had opened a canister of hydrogen cyanide or something and she didn’t know it. [Well, maybe not, Andy. It smells like bitter almonds. Not everyone can smell it. Seriously? The inability to smell bitter almonds is just one kind of dysosmia and it’s a recessive sex-linked genetic trait. Hey, I’m just sayin’.]
Anyway, it wasn’t cyanide. It was just Miranda. [There is a difference.]
Because Andy remained clueless, she didn’t know there was some serious footwear making its presence known outside and that Miranda Fucking Priestly was entering the building. [I’m sure you all noticed the cinematographer did a quick shot of Miranda from a lower angle and from the same side as a reference to the Elias Clarke building shot from just a bit earlier to make an equivalence between the two, right? It’s so obvious and 101, right? Yeah. But it made me laugh. I like my cinematic analogies in two-bite brownie size.]
So, Andy watched, with a growing sense of the anxiety that had been dispersed through the office (Or was it cyanide gas? She couldn’t smell.), as Miranda arrived.
***
Emily rushed and met Miranda at the entrance and followed her feeling like a spaniel that’d had one too many puppy spankings. Miranda was doing her Gatling gun impression. Emily sighed even as she listened, knowing that Miranda wouldn’t give a shit about her knowledge of the first true rapid-fire weapon used in American history. No-Miranda wanted attractive female paratroopers. Was that asking too much? Definitely, in Emily’s opinion. Why jump out of airplanes if you were truly attractive? How quixotic would that be?
Then she remembered. Oh God, that Andy person still existed.
Of course Miranda saw this, since (like a bloodhound) she could smell one part “something to make me want to fuck everyone up” in about a zillion parts water.
Emily tried to play it off but Miranda was in one of those moods-one of those moods she was in every single day. So Emily had to acquiesce. Of course she did. Because that was her new middle name. Which, when she’d thought about it-and shamefully she had-sounded like some fragrance ad or something: Do you want to tell that special someone just how very submissive you’re feeling? How very eager to please? Wear Acquiescence-a new exclusive fragrance for those women who are entirely whipped. A delicate mixture of bergamot, jasmine and other patented essential tones we like to call ‘Please say I did a good job,’ ‘Spank me,’ ‘Oh God, I think I actually want you to fuck me.’
Anyway, Emily shoved Andy along and snatched the satchel that matched absolutely nothing the woman was wearing out of her hands as she did so.
***
Andy was now sort of truly terrified because this Miranda woman seemed daunting with a capital De fuck?
[And at this point, because Andy wasn’t most of us, she didn’t immediately think when she looked at Miranda, “Oh, yeah. I’ll take that with a side of fries. Wait. Fuck the fries. That’s the full meal right there.” What? Oh please. No! An analogy. I didn’t mean that in a vulgar way. At all.]
The woman looked up and Andy realized she’d had guys look at her and stuff all her life but she’d never felt herself perused. First time for everything. She put her resumé on Miranda’s desk and began her spiel. Miranda wasn’t looking at her, just looking at her newspaper, and started to say this frosty cold but true shit about Andy’s total inappropriateness for the job.
[See-this is our real introduction to Miranda so she’s all Super-Bitch-And-Could-Care-Less-A-Saurus Rex. And, yeah, Andy does feel like she’s in Jurassic-Runway Park. Brontosaur-Emily pushed her in and Pterano-Bald Guy is still out there roaming around.]
Then Miranda served it up-the piping hot platter of ‘tude about Andy’s clothes. Andy looked down and the memo arrived. She only skimmed it but she got the gist. Miranda did not think Andy was all that. This was Runway and NYC and Miranda had just told her she didn’t measure the fuck up.
Andy suddenly felt exactly like she’d put her tongue on a frozen metal lamppost and it’d stuck and she was sort of anxiously talking around her trapped tongue. Which didn’t necessarily make her Candidate A for the job. When Miranda dismissed her, Andy immediately felt abashed with a capital A (not Candidate A). But her Midwest gumption (which is why Midwesterners totally rock!) couldn’t let her leave without making one last stand, around her tongue that was still fucking stuck to that lamppost.
Andy blurted out what she considered her mad skillz. And then Miranda looked at her, really looked at her. It was sort of a reptilian look. The calm, appraising look of some Fashion Empress Asp of Doom who was wondering whether she should even bother biting through that bad blazer to get to the two-bite brownie Midwesterner inside. [No. Make that three-bite, Miranda thought.]
Just then, that bald guy came in and totally ignored her and Miranda ignored her too.
Suddenly Andy’s tongue was free. Thank God! It was over. She said a lame goodbye and then walked out, suddenly realizing that at least she had driven a few cars in her lifetime and that maybe Auto Universe was a good fit, after all.
No one could have been more surprised to hear her own name called out in the lobby than Andy. She turned and saw Emily summon her-in a pretty petulant-ass way.
Job! Andy ftw!
***
[Okay. Stay tuned for next week, when you’ll see (or not!):
Andy really only skimmed the memo because she chooses an even worse outfit for her first day at work. (And she still thinks she’s all that-our heroine will need to smack her little head to wake the fuck up.)
Watch Andy take direction from Miranda the first time: It’s like seeing someone download some bootleg copy of Watchmen on a dial-up connection in her brain. Good times!
And, later, Professor Missy Elliott again offers some helpful advice, seconded by Nigel:
“If you're a fly gal, get your nails done
Get a pedicure, get your hair did.”
Yeah. It’s like that, Andy. Welcome to Runway and to the Big Apple, baby.]
Tossing the baton to our next Round Robin author, ashaelia. Heads up! Incoming!
A QUICK REMINDER!
Because this is a Round Robin, the comments you leave are not only where you tell me how awesome I am or how cosmically I suck, but also where you post suggestions for the next chapter. Tell the good ship ashaelia where you want her to go (snicker). See this post for further information!