During my days as a struggling illustrator in New York I did a lot of odd jobs to make ends meet, including drawing caricatures at parties, running a carousel at a street fair, and even a bit of modeling. Never a glamorous GQ cover boy , I was more of a character type, and the high point of my modeling career was probably appearing as ”Randall Schwab, Jr.” in the ”O.C. and Stiggs” special issue of the National Lampoon (O.C. and Stiggs were two slacker teen characters who appeared in the magazine, and Schwab, Jr. was their nerd nemesis, eventually played by Jon Cryer when Robert Altman brought the characters to the screen).
My favorite modeling job, however, has to be this photo illustration from 1991 for a column by Anka Radakovitch in Details about getting fired. The photographer, a very creative Yugoslav named Primoz Kotnik, achieved the effect of me flying out the door by setting the whole composition up sideways- the door was mounted on the floor, the model playing the boss was lying on the floor kicking up into the air, and I was jumping up and down on a concealed trampoline, trying to stay in sync with the papers that were being tossed into the air. Turning the picture sideways should make it clearer.
I did another photo shoot for Primoz later in which I was pushed down 6th Avenue in a bathtub on wheels, like Peter Tork in the opening to The Monkees. Unfortunately, Primoz died not long after that. The story I heard is that he was out on a blind date when the van he was driving was struck by another vehicle. Both Primoz and his date were killed.
