I’ll Talk To You On Your Deathbed!
Hi friend—
I was scrolling through Threads and paused on a thread by a woman I don’t know or follow. She posted that seeing her favorite famous actors on the Cameo app makes her feel all kinds of ways. None of them good.
Then this guy replied with a five-post thread. I’d never heard of him but he’s a well-known pastry chef from the Food Network show Ace of Cakes.
After reading his first post, I realized I’d never actually examined my own feelings about Cameo. My opinions defaulted to whoever the most cynical person about Cameo was.
I kept reading.
When Cameo first showed up in 2017, a wave of comedians joined. I didn’t launch an account, assuming that all I’d get were creepy requests from men. Sure, there’s an option to decline making a video, but I didn’t even want to see the requests.
But underneath all of that was something I couldn’t admit. I was afraid, no terrified, to be seen attempting to earn extra money outside of my career.
Growing up Gen X, it was a sin to be seen as a sellout. Most of us didn’t have to worry about this luxury problem because no one I know had a song that a car company wanted to purchase for a commercial. Luckily, I’d outgrown that unnecessary damage.
In 2017, there was a flattening of class. If you were in your forties with a mild 401(k), you were treated like you were elite by people new to politics who had the loudest voices online.
Earlier that year, I’d partnered with a low-cost, online, fun jewelry company. I liked the nameplate necklace trend and, wanting to put a new and mildly sociopolitical spin on it, developed nameplate necklaces that said things like “Childfree,” “Over 40,” and “Cat Lady.”
When I promoted my jewelry line, I got attacked online by young people on the Left, even though I, too, am on the left. They framed it as a cash grab, assuming that I was already rich and somehow hoarding money by partnering to make 15% of my costume jewelry sales for a limited time.
The campaign collapsed because every time the company posted about it, they were flooded with comments from these bros and broettes calling me a “corporate whore.”
Almost ten years later, the fight is so clearly not between working artists who charge for something and regular people. It’s us and the billionaires, and sometimes even the millionaires, who control the industries.
I’m currently in the longest stretch between jobs I’ve had in eighteen years because the billionaire class is actively strangling the life out of working artists in the TV industry.
Reading pastry chef Duff Goldman’s threads felt like permission to see Cameo differently, or at least to stop seeing everything through other people’s eyes and my own PTSD-colored glasses.
(Actually, I went to download Cameo and realized I had already signed up in 2017 but abandoned it before I could even begin. One of the rare perks of ADHD; sometimes I forget that I’ve already done the hard part of a task.)
I have a fantasy that my Cameo experience ends up identical to Duff Goldman’s, that it becomes this intimate and strange window into only the beautiful side of human nature.
Or maybe no one will ever hire me.
Most likely, it’ll be unremarkably somewhere in the middle.
Anyway, let me know if you need me to talk to you on your deathbed, or just talk you through your bed rot. https://www.cameo.com/jenkirkman
xo, jen