World-famous blind nude model tells all

My one minute of fame from that “Where are They Now?” video about me on the Oprah Winfrey Network last month brought up a lot of questions from friends who didn’t know me back when I modeled nude for art students.

Visit the OWN site for the full clip.

One Safe & Sound blog follower emailed me personally with a lot of questions, and assuming some of you other readers might have been too shy to ask, I figured I’d answer the questions here for any of you who are interested.

1. Did it bother you being nude in front of all those guys? Well for one thing, there were some female art students in class, too. And the art professors who were at my audition (yes, you have to audition to be a nude model, they want to make sure you won’t freak out on your first day and waste the three-hour classtime) reassured me ahead of time that art students think of models the same way medical students think of the naked bodies they work with. “It’s all very professional,” they said, pointing out that a lot of the students would be freshmen and not yet very sure of themselves as artists. “Add to that the fact that they’ve probably never been in a room with a naked stranger before, and you’ll realize they’ll be a lot more nervous than you’ll be.” I remember wondering why we didn’t all get naked then, you know, just to make absolutely sure the nervous playing field was level? So yes, I was a bit nervous at first, but after a while I focused more on staying still than worrying what I looked like up there.
2. How long did you have to stay very still and not move? Fifty minutes, and then I’d get a ten minute break.
3. How long do you have to sit there? Each class was three hours long, and remember, sometimes I was standing up in the same pose the entire time with just two ten-minute breaks. Teachers made it clear that if I couldn’t hold a pose for the entire 50 minutes, all I had to do was call out to the teacher that I needed a break. They’d come with masking tape to mark the position my feet were in so that I’d have a better chance of striking up the identical pose when I returned. My favorite poses were the ones where I was laying down.
4. Do you think you would have been a nude model if you still had your eye sight? No way.
5. Or did the fact you were blind enter into your decision to model at all? Yes. The ADA had been passed, but I was still out of work and pretty bummed out about it. I’d applied for jobs but by then employers had already figured out ways to avoid hiring me without mentioning anything about blindness, they knew how to avoid being sued. On Sunday evenings my husband Mike would read the want ads out loud to me. When he came to the one about needing nude models, he read it out loud as a sort of joke. I memorized the phone number without telling him and called for an audition.
6. Did you enjoy doing it or did it bother you? It was okay. A thing I didn’t like about it was that I got achy sometimes, standing in one position. The good part was feeling like I was still part of the visual arts. Another thing: staying still so long gave me lots of time to think about my writing, how to reformulate a lead, how to get across a certain idea. In fact, I used that quiet time to put together my very first published essay. I composed it in my head and then typed it into my talking computer the minute I got home. Nude Modeling: Goin’ In Blind was picked up by “Alternet” and published in alternative newspapers all over the country.
7. Do you still model? I quit modeling in 2003, after my memoir Long Time, No See was published and we moved from Urbana, Illinois to Chicago. In a convoluted way, the success of that essay I’d written about nude modeling led to the publication of my memoir, my appearance on Oprah, my job leading memoir-writing classes here in Chicago, my recorded essays on NPR, and this blog. So hey, I’m glad I gave it a try.