The Best Time I Visited Times Square

by Kate Fridkis

I try to avoid Times Square. Actually, I’m one of those really ordinary New Yorkers who make aggressive, snide comments about it to out-of-towners who were thinking about checking it out. Like, “Oh please. You get run over by a bunch of tourists.” Then, one day, hoping no one I’d ever talked smack about Times Square in front of witnessed it, I had to walk through there on my way to meet someone. And I was in a terrible mood. Not just because of the hating Times Square, but because I felt ugly.

It was not the first time in my life I’d felt ugly.

I’m a body image blogger. I write about beauty and learning to love myself and how other people should learn to love themselves. Sometimes it works. And sometimes it doesn’t work at all, and then I’m kind of embarrassed, because my mom calls me on it and says, “Do you even read your own writing? Maybe you should go and read your own writing.” I used to feel bad when I felt ugly because I felt ugly. Now I feel bad when I feel ugly because I am failing at not feeling ugly. And I should know better.

It’s complicated.

So on this particular ugly day, in this ugly place, the person I was supposed to meet was running late, so I took a seat which had clearly not been taken because of a copious deposit of bird droppings. And I opened up my personal pizza from the nearby Jamba Juice. (Did you know you could get pizza there? Don’t do it. But you already knew that.) And I sat there eating stupid Jamba Juice pizza and feeling ugly.

And suddenly this little blond girl popped up next to me, and she said, “Excuse me, but are you on America’s Next Top Model?”

I stared at her uncomprehendingly.

“Oh my god!” she said, and she waved at a cluster of similarly blond, pert girls, who were all clearly tourists, and they all started shrieking and going, “I knew it!! I totally recognized her!”

And I said, “Wait, no. Um, I’m not.”

“Wait — “ said the first girl. “You’re not?” She was confused. “That’s crazy. You look JUST like this girl on it!” She waved her friends down.

“Sorry,” I said, grinning.

“It’s OK!” She hopped off, looking like NYC was still an exciting place for her.

I sat there, pizza in hand, stunned.

I mean, whatever, it’s not like I’m trying to look like a model, I’m just trying to feel good about how I look. Obviously. Obviously, I don’t look like someone who’d be on TV, modeling. And obviously I realize it’s possible to be a model, especially on ANTM, and feel ugly. And obviously people who intentionally go to Times Square may not have their finger on the pulse of what is hot, hot, hot these days. But it still felt really good.

I stood up. I put my shoulders back. I felt like my neck might be long and slender (it really isn’t). I felt guilty. I shouldn’t need someone to mistake me for a wannabe TV model to make me feel attractive. But sometimes feeling attractive is hard. I texted my mom about what had just happened. “UR beautiful” she wrote back. She says that because she made me. But the little blond girls didn’t even know me.

The next day I tried to decide if I should blog about what happened. I didn’t want to sound too excited. I thought that might undermine my message. You don’t need people to tell you that you look like a sexy TV woman just to feel pretty. Which is not my whole message, but is an important part of it, I think.

I felt a little like I had somehow cheated on my blog. But I felt really good. Which lasted for, oh, like another day.

Kate Fridkis does all that blogging about body image at Eat the Damn Cake. She lives far away from Times Square, in Brooklyn.