Sandy lives in a normal apartment. Okay, maybe the neighborhood
is a little nicer than most, but there are no magic lights
or Maseratis. There isn't even a swimming pool. Sandy sits
on a normal couch and eats normal pizza. Her neighbors are
normal people. She has normal dishes in her cupboard, and
a bedroom devoted especially to her pet parrot.
"Funny
being me? No, I don't think it's at all funny," says Sandy. "Try
to imagine that it's perfectly normal being me."
This is not
easy. On the bus that goes towards Sandy's apartment, an
old lady opens a newspaper. The front page opens out, to
reveal at the top, in pride of place, an enormous real-color
reproduction of Sandy, topless, with a bold tabloid headline: "Sandy
Shocker! Photo model stunner seen in revealing Internet series."
Sandy is often upset about the attention the press gives her. This
time is no exception: seeing right through the compliment
of being put on the front page (which has become quite natural
to her,) Sandy complains that she has been maligned. "Everybody
already knows that Sandy is a national treasure," says the
article, "as much as any famous landmarks you can name and
our national cuisine put together. But now the world is getting
a better look at this great attraction."
Sandy
never rides the bus -- her Toyota hatchback gets her where
she wants to go. There's a sense in which Sandy riding public
transport with everybody else would be a little out of place.
But sitting on the sofa, Sandy isn't all that bothered that
the world wants to look at her so much. She insists that
it doesn't really affect her daily life: "It's normal for
me," she says. "When I was growing up, people were always
looking at me -- and can you blame them?"
"I
was born into the modeling industry," says Sandy. But this
is a slight exaggeration. Actually Sandy was born in a tiny
little village tucked away in an obscure corner of the country,
population less than 300, where needless to say she learned
about the experience of being well-known. Sandy spent her
early childhood there, as the daughter of a foreign father
who left while she was still in her infancy. Sandy's mother
raised her and her sister single-handedly -- and worked nights
to cover the bills. Sandy, as soon as she was old enough to think, began to dance away her idle hours.
She
also began to sing, she says: "Whenever things in the house
got to be too much for me, I would start singing along to
the radio ... Sometimes I would try to drown it out, sometimes
to make my voice combine with the music -- and I would dance
too, when I was in the mood."
Soon
enough Sandy's dancing started to attract attention: she
danced onstage for the
first time when she was eight. But those halcyon years
were soon to end. Soon afterwards; Sandy's family went to
live
in the city, and looking back now at pictures from that
time in her life, Sandy feels almost as though she were looking
at pictures from another life completely. "My life really
started when I came to the city," she says. She hasn't been
back to the village since.
Sandy
didn't have her first modeling job until the ripe old age
of eleven. But she got used early to seeing her picture everywhere.
That was partly because her first serious boyfriend,at the age
of 16, was something of a famous public figure. Sandy doesn't
want to say exactly who, but hints that he may have been
involved in the music industry. "We were seen everywhere
together," she says -- and since then it's always been the
situation in her life
that people know who she is, even if she doesn't know them.
Since then she's done thousands of shoots, runway jobs, swimsuit
catalogs, and commercials for everything from cars to yogurt.
It's fair to say her face has made it into quite a lot of
households -- and maybe not just her face! -- but Sandy still,
sitting in her rented flat, is able to ask what glamour is.
"So
a lot of people see my picture; I turn a lot of people on.
Maybe their sex lives are better because of it. A lot of
people are happy because of me. But what is that to me? I
never see those people; my life is exactly the same." Almost
as though it's a different Sandy whose picture is in magazines
everywhere? "No -- don't get me wrong. That's definitely
me in those pictures -- and I'm my biggest critic. I know
when I look good, and when I don't, and when I look at pictures
of myself I know what I am seeing." But she is still the
real-life Sandy, -- who, if anything, is even more gorgeous
than the first -- who goes clubbing, listens to dance music,
("The only real music!" says Sandy,) has girlfriends, and
generally leads a normal life.
Normal
life for Sandy is like normal life for you and me on caffeine.
She's been around the world enough times that jetting off
to Norway or to Spain for a month of work is like popping
around the corner. Her parents live in America, (mom is now
remarried,) and she spends two months a year there. She's
also got girlfriends in every city in the world. With a normal
life like that, imagine what her holidays are like!
Sandy
admits that she doesn't really know a lot of people outside
the modeling industry. But she doesn't really feel like her
life is lacking anything because of that!
"I
admit it," says Sandy, "a lot of people would probably kill
to have my life. Especially that I get to sleep with a lot
of the world's most beautiful women. I bet a lot of the guys
would really like to have my love life!" she says. "That's
why I started this site."
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