Crash Test Girl Page 10

  This is what I looked like the day before the Emmys.

  You can take the girl out of the shop, but not the shop out of the girl.

  * * *

  CRASH TEST STYLE HACKS

  Use toilet seat covers to get rid of shine on your face for low-rent papier poudré.

  Try desert dust for a dry shampoo.

  Use 600-grit sandpaper as a nail file.

  Rub the foam that comes with dry-cleaning hangers to get deodorant stains off your clothes.

  Shave your sweater with a razor to get the pills off (like I did approximately five minutes before I did a segment on Today with Hoda and Kathie Lee).

  Wear black polish to hide grease under your nails and . . .

  Wear black clothing to hide dirt and grime.

  Layer. If one shirt gets covered in paint or grease, you can just peel it off.

  Have many boot options. I’m a boot collector and have different styles for all occasions: tall boots for snake country, waterproof boots for a muddy bomb range, booties for city walking. Because I wear tight clothes (see here), and can’t fit a lot in my pants pockets, I wear knee-high boots and slip my phone, cash, cards, and multi-tool into them for easy storage and access. It’s perfect for shop work or an outdoor concert. Bonus: If your phone is in your boot, it won’t fall out of your back pocket and into the port-o-potty.

  Bandanas! They work for sweat, pulling back hair, carrying large amounts of nuts and bolts, and as face masks for dust and the desert.

  * * *

  It was all a facade, and we were willing participants in it. This is a fantasy, not anything close to reality, I kept thinking, which was ironic because we were in the reality TV category. As a tongue-in-cheek moment to remind myself of the surreality of the Emmys, I always took a picture of myself on the toilet in my gown to send to Brittany every year. It was an inside joke between us, a social commentary on the absurdity and preciousness of the red carpet, how all these glamorous, impeccably groomed and styled stars were going to have to pee at some point over the long evening and night of festivities. If you do have the occasion to glitz and glam it up, have fun with it, do NOT overspend on it, and remember that under all those sequins, you’re still you.

  IDEALLY THE JOB YOU WANT IS A GOOD FIT, REGARDLESS OF THE STYLE REQUIREMENTS

  When I was a liquor ambassador, I had to dress like a party girl. Not the job I wanted.

  When I was a receptionist at the ad agency, I dressed in “respectable” slacks and sweaters, and hated my life.

  When I hit the job jackpot and went to work at M5 Industries, and on TV as a MythBusters host, I wore what I would have put on anyway (minus the neckwear). For the most part, my “real” clothes were also my “work” clothes, so I guess I had always dressed for the job I wanted.

  During the MythBusters years, I’d look at my filthy nails, finger Band-Aids and duct tape residue, ruined T-shirts and paint-splattered jeans, and think, Dirty hands + dirty clothes = bliss. I’d dreamed of a career where I’d be covered in paint and plaster, and when I got there, I was overjoyed.

  * * *

  I LIKE YOUR STYLE

  I admire anyone who has great style, either fashionable or functional. In the fashionable category, I admire bravery and individuality and adore artistic expression in the stories of:

  Iris Apfel. My fave quote of hers: “Fashion you buy, style you possess.”

  Helena Bonham Carter. Her unusual outfits and quirky sensibility give her the look of a real-life Tim Burton character. (They were a couple, FYI.)

  Grace Jones. No one embodied strength like her, or skewed gender aesthetics as fearlessly (with the exception of Bowie, maybe).

  Deborah Harry. She remains sexy at seventy-two because of her “don’t give a fuck” attitude and self-confidence.

  Courtney Love. During the Live Through This era of grunge, she sold me forever on a silk slip and combat boots.

  Basquiat. His hand-painted clothing as art.

  Kim Gordon. My grunge nostalgia touchstone.

  Lady Gaga. For making fashion a performance.

  Björk. Because Björk!

  Pharrell. He can rock a park ranger hat, and always looks crisp and tailored within an inch of his life.

  Prince. The velvet boot-cut pants and frilly shirt king of all time.

  In the functional category:

  People who wear the same thing every day, like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. They don’t want to waste time, energy, and attention on clothes, so they just wear one uniform every day.

  Jamie Hyneman made his black beret and white shirt his signature look for years. I asked him about it and he said, “Everyone remembers the beret guy.”

  Fran Lebowitz and Alfred Hitchcock. Can’t go wrong with the daily dark tailored suit; apparently it is a sign of creative genius.

  Daisy Ridley. As Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, she wore her Jedi flats, which made sense since she was running around the woods fighting evil Kylo Ren. There shouldn’t be heels in space.

  French women. From what I have seen, with wild flowing hair and a stylish romantic scarf, they age gracefully and just get sexier.

  * * *

  I believe you do have to dress in appropriate attire for the job you’re trying to get (if not the one you eventually want ten years from now, because who the hell knows what you’ll be doing then?). Your first impression should impress, no matter what your profession is. When I have pitch meetings or auditions nowadays, I show up looking sharp and clean so they think, “She tried to look crisp, therefore, she cares and respects us.” If I showed up looking like a slob (which wouldn’t be “me” anyway), they’d think, “She can’t be bothered, so why should we take her interest in us seriously?”

  I recently had an important meeting at a major network, and you bet I agonized about what to wear. The show was about technology, and I knew the people in the meeting would be looking at me almost as a template. Could I pull off their vision of the tech-savvy role? I decided to keep it simple with nice black jeans, a clean gray shirt, a fitted jacket, and booties. The only real flair was earrings made from roller chain I stole from a robot.

  How you dress reflects on you, but also shows your deference to the people you’re dealing with. It’s a nod, like saying, “I understand what you want from me.” Once you get the job, all bets are off and you can wear whatever you want.

  THERE’S A HAMMER IN EVERY TOOL

  So how is style like deciding between gasoline, C-4, or nondairy creamer? You have to choose the right explosive for the given job to make the right impression (and know whether blast shields will be necessary). Every situation has a purpose, and the clothes are just tools to get the job done. The day before I walked the red carpet, I was running around the shop in a welding mask, and got that job done. On Emmy night, the job was to glitz it up for a surreal night.

  Glamour moments when you obsess about every detail of your look are like desserts. They’re great every once in a while, but too much of them will change you, not for the better. I like the balance of occasionally slipping into a fantasy world of the red carpet, but I live in my cozy home of comfort and functionality. I can be famous, sexy, and myself, in gowns or in coveralls. No matter what I’m wearing or how people perceive me, I’m still me, and there’s more to me than I used to think.

  In the shop, we can make anything work for us. Don’t have the exact right tool? Use what you have however you can. It’s the same with style. You don’t need exactly the right piece to make or break an outfit. Make a great look with whatever you’ve got. It might be a challenge, but if it weren’t, getting dressed would be boring. My MythBusters family is going to laugh when they see how I have appropriated our old shop saying for fashion:

  Chapter Six

  Alcohol

  At MythBusters, whenever we’d test myths about nausea, we had to make the subject feel sick first before we could experiment with possible cures. How to make someone feel queasy in the shop? I invented a vomit chair us
ing a design I borrowed from NASA. It was actually a dentist chair on a revolving platform. You sat in the chair, and then tried to touch tennis balls attached to four points around your head, while spinning. The dynamic movement is disorienting to the inner ear.

  The first time we used the chair was to test seasickness cures. Grant sat down and spun around until he felt on the verge of puking, and then he’d eat some ginger. Or he’d sit, spin, nearly vomit, and take Dramamine. Every day for a week, poor Grant had to get in the chair and, more often than not, hurl his guts out. What a way to start your workday. Isn’t TV glamorous?

  Not too long after, we did another test of hangover queasiness cures. Every night for three nights, Tory and Grant drank themselves crazy drunk. The first night was beer only. Then hard liquor only. Then a mix of beer and liquor. They really put their bodies on the line, going drink for drink until wasted. We calculated the amount it should take by body weight, measured diligently and tested consistently. We built a set so they could sleep in the shop, which was cold and mouse-infested. It wouldn’t be a controlled experiment if they went home to their own beds, ate their own food, and puked in their own bathrooms. We monitored it all. Our reality TV was so much more real than most. People are always amazed how we actually did everything they saw on their screens.

  The degree of pain in Tory’s and Grant’s hangovers was always worse if they’d had beer, alone or mixed with liquor. (I’ve found the same thing in my home testing, incidentally.) But since this was MythBusters, we needed measurable data for our conclusion, not just arbitrary anecdotal results. The test was about the intensity of the hangover, so the boys would have to push their queasiness quotient in . . . The Chair.

  Grant was hurting bad when he staggered into the room, still drunk from the night before. He sat down, pale and sweaty.

  I smiled at him, and said, “Just think. When you vomit, the test is over!”

  And he immediately retched.

  He said later that just looking at the chair, with all its bad memories from the seasickness cures test, was enough, and he couldn’t hold back. Grant was so conditioned to associate the chair with puking, he hurled just from looking at it. He had an involuntary spontaneous reaction.

  Sunday Funday

  I have a framed poem by Charles Bukowski, author of Barfly and many other novels, hanging on the wall of my art studio called “The Laughing Heart.” I wish I could reprint it for you, but I’d have to give the Bukowski estate my entire book advance. Here’s one line: “You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes.”

  A famous overindulger, Bukowski might’ve been trying to drown death in life, most of the time. He was a literary hero of mine, and I admired his rebel spirit and respected his heavy drinking as his inspiration.

  In my early twenties, before I started working on MythBusters and before I met Paul, I was reading alcoholic and junkie writers almost exclusively, and listening to addict grunge-era musicians. Oh, and drinking. Creating art seemed inextricably linked to drugs and booze, and, as an aspiring artist myself, I aspired to follow in my heroes’ footsteps, living on the edge, and believing that great art would be the end result of copious consumption. I’d point to Nirvana and say, “Kurt Cobain is an addict, but listen to this song!” The people driving breakthroughs were using anything they could get their hands on.

  I was really comfortable in dives all over San Francisco among the punk/grunge or rockabilly kids. There is something romantic about reading and writing from the end of a bar with my favorite scotch. The characters around me were great for both people-watching and inspiration. My roommates and I would roam from bar to bar in high-top sneakers, holey jeans, and flannel, play pool, shoot darts, and drink too much. As I’ve mentioned, I knew from my mom every crappy watering hole that offered free hors d’oeuvres (aka dinner), and would make the rounds to eat, drink, and create my persona as that girl, a wild child who lived each day to the fullest. We were just having fun, me and my equally artsy, equally grungy friends, crawling through the bar scene in our early twenties in a city known for its culture of freedom and expression.

  One afternoon after I was at some dive with a bunch of friends, I came home to find my roommate Ariella angry with concern. “Kari. You have got to stop drinking. You are a mess,” she said.

  “But it’s Sunday,” I replied.

  “Every day is Sunday for you!”

  WHEN/WHERE/HOW MUCH SHOULD I DRINK?

  Are You Drinking Too Much?

  I don’t know about you, but I have been wrestling with this question since I was a teenager, and continue to, even now that I’m a grown woman and responsible for another human life. I should not be having more than one glass of Chardonnay at lunch, but that one glass, at my local, artisanal pizzeria with the sun streaming in the window, really does feel like poetry. I have had all my most brilliant ideas after one glass of wine. I truly believe it is my perfect state of being.

  My relationship with alcohol is long and complicated, because of my upbringing (more on that in a moment!), bouts with depression (more on that in chapter 8), social anxiety, and the fact that booze was, for a few years, my livelihood. No matter how much I justified my consumption, I kind of always knew it might be a bit much.

  A friend of mine, a former smoker, got herself to quit by imagining every cigarette butt she’d ever flicked on the street or stubbed out in an ashtray appearing suddenly in a mountainous pile in the middle of her living room. Whenever she’s tempted to smoke, she visualizes her own personal tobacco landfill. It turns her stomach and puts the kibosh on her craving.

  This trick does not work for me. When I imagine every drink I’ve ever had poured into a swimming pool, I kind of want to jump right in.

  The Fuzzy Navel

  I come from a family of social drinkers and party lovers. Throughout my childhood and to this day, my parents host or go to parties five days a week. Actually, that might be a slow week for the Byrons. I grew up eating hors d’oeuvres for dinner, as in, “Really, Mom? Bean dip, again?” Just kidding. I love bean dip for dinner!

  * * *

  NOT MY FINEST HOUR

  When drinking, I was full of reckless confidence and could lie through my teeth to my parents and take fantastic risks not to get caught coming home later, or going out when I wasn’t supposed to. Besides the basics of always having gum in my backpack, I would formulate answers to their questions—“Where have you been?,” “What have you been doing?,” and “Who were you with?”—before I walked through the door. I recently told my mom that I used to sneak out of the house through a window, or tiptoe through the front door, and either take the car out in the middle of the night, even before I had my driver’s license, or jump onto my bicycle.

  She had no idea. “You did? That’s terrible!”

  It really was, because I rode my bike home loaded. I still shudder and thank my lucky stars that I didn’t get in any accidents.

  * * *

  All of our family traditions had deep roots in alcohol. On Christmas, we had Irish coffee in the morning and Bloody Marys in red plastic cups at the afternoon parade. On Thanksgiving, we drank wine all day. On Tuesdays, my dad and grandfather always had Manhattans. They gave me the cherries. A coming-of-age rite of passage in the Byron household: When someone in the family turned twenty-one, she or he got what we called a “Mae West.” We had special hourglass-shaped glasses that emulated the curvy female body of the famous foulmouthed actress (love her). Grampa poured 7UP into the bottom chamber, and “smooth as silk” Kessler Whiskey, aka rocket fuel, into the top. Downing it in one gulp was like a shot and a chaser in one glass. “Puts hair on your chest,” the men would say. (Not much of an enticement for me.) I associated celebrations with getting tipsy, and we celebrated a lot.

  In the 1990s, my parents ran a champagne cellar every weekend, hosting tastings and giving tours of the cellars. Basically, they worked for wine. Did you know the sound of clinking glasses is called “tintinnabulation,” meant to sou
nd like the ringing of church bells and to ward away evil spirits? I do, because I have heard my dad share this little fact almost a million and three times. He and Mom had a deep appreciation for the beauty of wine—the color, the aroma, the ritual of the pour. Could they be any more Northern Californian? In our family, it wasn’t only that a drink could make you the life of the party. There was no party without it.

  My drinking life apart from family parties began in earnest in high school and it served a very specific purpose: Drink to open up. From what I’d observed at my parents’ parties and from my own experiences, people got loose after a drink or two. Drinking was the perfect remedy for all my high school social problems.

  Before a kegger in someone’s backyard or basement, I’d pre-game with my friends who were a bit older and knew the special liquor store just outside of town limits that didn’t check ID. Our inaugural teenage drink of choice was a Fuzzy Navel, the perfect cocktail for a teenager’s taste buds, consisting of orange juice and peach schnapps. After three of them, I felt like the most charming person in the room. While my friends used alcohol to lighten up, I used it to transform. I knew, from the bottom of my heart (and glass), that if I hadn’t had a pitcher’s worth of Fuzzy Navels, I wouldn’t have been talking, laughing, smiling, making eye contact with cute boys, or playing spin the bottle. I would have been cringing in the corner. There’s a reason it’s called liquid courage, and drinking Absolut(ely) worked for me.

  DRINKING HELPS YOU BECOME A BETTER VERSION OF YOURSELF

  The Crutch

  At college and later while traveling the world, I grabbed a drink whenever, wherever I felt insecure or anxious. I’d drop into unfamiliar situations and environments every several days while traveling, and all that newness triggered my anxiety. Fortunately, my tried-and-true remedy was always available at a moment’s notice.