Hands, Her Greatest Asset

This story was written for NYU Livewire, the New York University Department of Journalism's feature syndicate:

American Express. Avon. McDonalds. Neutrogena. Pampers. Panasonic. Sprint. Tums.

You’ve seen Ellen Sirot advertise all of these products and companies, though you’d never know it.

Sirot, 37, is a top parts model: she specializes in showing off her hands, feet and legs. Earning as much as several thousand dollars a day working for TV and magazine ads, she is a supermodel in a competitive field most people have never heard of.

“My hands are really beautiful,” Sirot said in a recent interview. “They’re an amazing work of art. Pure porcelain. They’re like a newborn kitten, they’re so soft.”

Parts Models, a New York City agency, represents Sirot and more than 100 other men and women. Former model Dani Korwin founded the company in 1986, and takes credit for discovering the niche: no other agencies were representing parts models then, she said.

“You have to make a conscientious effort to take care of the body part,” Korwin said. “If you’re a foot model, you can’t wear flip-flops, in the event that you may stub a toe. This is part of the downside of parts modeling.”

Sirot’s hands, for example, have not seen the sun for 15 years, she said. She owns over 500 pairs of gloves and rarely takes them off, except to moisturize her hands some 20 times a day. She does not cook, clean or take out the garbage, because even a minor paper cut could cost her weeks of work. Wine glasses shatter in her nightmares.

“I started as a normal person,” she said. “But now I’m an obsessive hand model.”

Obsession is part of the job description, at least for female parts models. But the same techniques that keep a woman’s hands pristine “would be a little weird for men’s hands,” said male hand model Jimmy Furino.

“My hands are manicured, but they don’t look like mannequin hands,” Furino said. “I go to the gym, I get calluses, and my hand looks like a man’s.”

Furino, 47, usually works with Sirot when an ad calls for a couple - to promote jewelry, for example.

“I don’t prescribe to what she does,” Furino said. “She’s kind of a lunatic about it. But she’s the sweetest, kindest girl. The modeling world is generally a woman’s world anyway. She’s nutty about her hands, but she’s got her priorities straight.”

Sirot fell into modeling for extra income, while working as a dancer and waitress after graduating from Barnard College. A photographer told her she had athletic legs and perfect feet, and that she should show them off.

She got her first pedicure, then won an assignment to a national Dr. Scholl’s ad campaign, and saw her earnings rise from $2 an hour as a waitress to $300 an hour as a parts model. She soon noticed that hand models were the ones working every day.

“I became a hand detective,” she said. “It’s made me not only a hand model, but a hand care expert.”

A model’s hands must be veinless, poreless and flawless. Evenly shaped, healthy pink nails are important, as are soft cuticles and nailbeds.

“You want them to seem like they’re the hands of the girl next door,” Sirot said. “The all-American hand.”

Even at her wedding ten years ago, she wore sneakers to protect her feet and gloves to protect her hands.

She now lives with her husband in the New York City suburbs, in Westchester County. She and her young daughter have developed the “hand model high five” - a gentle tap of their palms - but she still relies on her husband or assistants for nearly every daily chore.

“Hands are like the forgotten appendage,” she adds. “They’re abused and usually not cared for at all. Ask any woman and she’ll say, ‘My hands show my age. I wish I could just sit on them.’ My hands look like a 20-year-old’s.”

The strength, endurance and muscle memory she developed as a dancer help, Sirot added. Cutting pizza or scrubbing a counter for an ad - activities she would never do at home - she must keep her hands steady and calm. Otherwise, the muscles and veins would show.

“It’s not as easy as it looks,” Sirot said. “It’s very yoga like. You’re acting with your hands.”

She is now one of few people in the world working full time as a hand model. And unlike Victoria’s Secret runway models, most of whom are out of a job by age 26, Sirot’s career has lasted. She expects to continue parts modeling for at least another 15 years.

“You can have a normal life,” Sirot said, “if you don’t mind wearing gloves all the time.”

Wanted: Ambitious Young Filmmakers

This article was written for NYU Livewire:

After her original editor bailed, writer/director Nancy O’Mallon desperately needed a film editor for her first feature documentary, about a journey across New Jersey’s blueberry country.

She turned to the online network Shooting People and found Melissa Ulto in New York.

“We ended up working really well together, and now we are partnering on a few other projects,” said Ulto, who became both editor and animator for O’Mallon’s The Mighty Humble Blueberry.

Part social network, part job search and message board, and part video showcase, Shooting People and other new sites like it are helping filmmakers, actors and crew find each other to produce films — and also to show films to new audiences.

Other specialty film sites include the Asian American Filmmakers Network, the Louisiana Independent Filmmakers Network, Queer Screen (for Australian gay and lesbian filmmakers), and Intellifilm, aimed at college film students.

Three New York University film students started Intellifilm in 2006, to help their film school peers cast and produce their work. Membership is free, and more than 1,000 filmmakers and movie-lovers have joined.

“People put all this money into making their movies, but the sad truth is, a lot of them don’t get watched,” said Eric Krausz, who started Intellifilm with fellow students Surjyakiran Das and Steve Gnoza in 2006. “Short films don’t have a long life after they’re made. So we wanted to make a venue where they could be watched, where a film doesn’t get lost among viral videos, like on YouTube.”

Before they find an audience, though, filmmakers need a team to make a movie.

“You can’t make a film on your own,” said Jess Search, who co-founded Shooting People with fellow filmmaker Cath Le Couteur in London, then helped expand it to New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. “Film is different from photography or painting or really any other art. People come together to make a film.”

For his 2006 DVD Yoga 4 Fellas, a spoof of instructional exercise videos, London actor and filmmaker Ailon Freedman went to Shooting People to find actors and get advice on topics ranging from casting to DVD distribution to publicity. His DVD has now been picked up for international distribution.

Shooting People members have won awards at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, premiered at Sundance, been nominated for Oscars, screened at Cannes and have found wider audiences than they might have otherwise, its founders say.

The network began with 60 of Search and Le Couteur’s friends; today, about 30,000 members participate in more than 100 productions each week. Membership costs $40 per year, but its founders say Shooting People has yet to make a profit.

Dr. Simone Ahuja often travels to India, where she is shooting a PBS travel series to be called “Indique: Untold Stories of Contemporary India.” In Bombay, she spotted a Shooting People ad for a producer to work on a film about the national diabetes epidemic. She eagerly signed on, to a production that eventually ran on CNBC as “Diabetes Around the World.”

Shooting People’s Mobile Cinema also crosses the country each summer, screening its members’ films along the way — in theaters, bars, even living rooms.

“There’s a plethora of ways to get films seen, especially on the internet,” said Ingrid Kopp, the network’s U.S. director. “But it’s sometimes hard to separate the ‘noise’ from the good creative filmmaking.”

Not everyone is sold on the idea of linking up with strangers online, though.

“Every job I’ve had on a movie has come from another job,” said NYU film student Scott Rashap. “I would not think to look online, because it’s all based on personal relationships in the film business. Why hire someone you’ve never met?”

But one connection leads to another. Many established filmmakers also look to Internet sites to find fresh, young talent.

“There’s no big corporation here,” Search said. Each member is “just a guy trying to make a film.”

A Cigarette For Your Life Story

This story was written for NYU Livewire, the New York University Department of Journalism's feature syndicate. The article currently appears in the Resident and Worldpress.org:

I am standing outside a bar in the East Village with my cigarette clenched between my lips. A young man walks out the door.

“Hey buddy, do you have another cigarette? I’ll give you half a joint for it.”

I have nearly a full pack in my pocket, so why not? He shows me the joint, but I shake my head.

“Thanks. You got a light?”

You might think this would be the end of our encounter. But it is only the beginning.

Tonight as so many other nights, in front of this bar as so many other bars, a cigarette is exchanged for a life story, crammed into the five to seven minutes between lighting up and stomping out.

This man is in his mid-twenties, with greasy brown dreadlocks, piercing eyes and an unkempt beard that obscures most of his face. He extends his hand and tells me his name is Noah, nice to meet you.

Noah says he is an artist and that all of his work is created with materials he finds on the city streets, in trash cans, and in the subway. Broken subway tiles and defunct tokens are repurposed as a belt buckle. Discarded ketchup and mustard packets become a painting. Colorful bits of shattered glass find their way into a mosaic. The city is, quite literally, his palette.

His newest project is MetroCard art. “I’m having a lot of fun with that right now,” he says.

“It’s great because I can do it all with what I find on the street. People throw out so much stuff that they don’t even think about. And then I go and sell it right back to them.”

I stomp out my cigarette and promise that I will look out for some good trash for him.

I’ve met innumerable people like Noah — although no one else, of course, at all like him. I have talked to homeless people, drunken partiers, bouncers, bartenders, confused tourists, delivery boys and bike messengers. A few entrepreneurs have tried to sell me vinyl records and light-up yo-yos. All as I stood outside taking a few drags of that slow-burning cigarette.

Restaurants and nightclub smoking bans now protect the health of employees and patrons in nearly half the United States. But they’ve also pushed people out into the streets. The unexpected side effect: the bans force us to talk to one another.

A downtown bouncer tells me about his two loves — a Danish woman who lives in Amsterdam with their son, and a Chinese woman who moved back to Beijing after the birth of their daughter.

A West Village waiter taking his smoke break is incredulous that a foolish friend has been paying alimony and child support in cash. “Man, I just know he’s gonna end up paying that woman twice!”

Outside an Off Track Betting outlet an old man smoking a cigar says he’s lived in this neighborhood since he and his wife emigrated from Poland almost six decades before.

They had to move, on two days notice, when the city condemned and demolished their apartment building years ago. They used to own a clothing store on this block, but that too is gone. He barely recognizes the neighborhood, now. But he refuses to ever move again.

Then he goes back inside to place his bets.

I leave Grand Central Station and light up. A man steps in front of me and asks could I spare some change, or maybe a cigarette? His gaunt face is almost hidden under a stained gray beanie, and his bright red windbreaker is full of holes.

“That’s Jake,” he says, taking a long drag from the cigarette I hand him, and pointing to an old Labrador retriever crouched at his side. “My name’s Carl. And those guys” — he points to a group of three men huddled around a shopping cart — “they’re my buddies. We’re all ex-marines. Now we live here on the street.”

They take care of each other, he says. “And I take care of Jake.”

Carl says he is 44, but he looks much older.

“I have cancer,” he says matter-of-factly. I’ve already given him my change and a cigarette, so I assume he is telling the truth.

“And I mean, I don’t really care about it anymore, because what can I do? But I’m all he’s got.” He tells how he rescued Jake from a friend’s apartment, where the dog had been chained in a closet, often unfed.

“I had to punch the guy a few times, ended up breaking a chair over his head. When I left with Jake, I wasn’t sure whether the dude was alive or dead.” The ex-owner and Carl no longer speak.

Maybe the reason these encounters are so exciting is that I know they’ll end when my cigarette does. I listen to people’s stories, or at least the bits and pieces they choose to share, and feel I’ve learned something about the city and its people. It’s just too bad that, even while cigarettes are offering me such a wide view, they’re killing me inside.