Yesterday, I Was Gisele Bundchen

lisa and Gisele......

Yesterday, I was Gisele Bundchen

       Yesterday, I was Gisele. I put on her outfit and became Gisele Bundchen for a whole day. I’m a news hound, I read a lot of media outlets’ offerings but, I’ll click on anything about the leggy, naturally gorgeous, wildly famous supermodel, Gisele. She’s authentic and fun and effervescent and, well, full of it. It’s handy, sure, that not one of her genes needs an edit, but, that’s not it, really. I just like her. And, incredibly, she seems to maintain a degree of “normalcy” — whatever that is — in spite of her embarrassment of various riches.

She was a guest on the television show, “The View”, promoting her new cookbook. I don’t watch The View or much TV at all. Well, until a global pandemic made me a connoisseur of available TV series, adding new vocabulary to my rich lexicon like, “streaming” and “bingeing.” But there, on my laptop, a bunch of female hosts — including Whoopie Goldberg — were sitting around chatting about Gisele’s new book and suddenly, there SHE was! She strode onto set wearing, holy mackerel!, MY jean skirt and MY oversized black turtleneck, oozing her signature infectious love of life and radiant humanity. I was hooked. I watched, rapt, high on Gisele, until the end of the segment. Then, I quietly slipped upstairs and donned the same outfit. Her sweater had been half-tucked at the waist — a stupid new trend I avoid because I avoid trends with a passion; as soon as I see what is trending, I make a quick mental note to stuff any similar items to the back of my closet until the day they are completely out of style when I’ll drag them back out and make them my own. But, I was Gisele; she deserved to have me embody her exactly, so, half-tucked it is. From eight AM on a snowy, sleet-encrusted Saturday, I was Gisele for the whole day. I looked just like her, I was her, and that’s that.

I’ve had a strange notion since I was very young that, once a person captures my attention in some unknowable, ineffable, and unpredictable way, once that person’s aspect fascinates me in a manner bordering on obsession, I begin to think I AM them. I look out of a face that is my own but, on the inside, I see myself as THEM. I become everything about them — I walk, talk, use their mannerisms, and imagine their thought processes — often for days at a time. When I was eleven, I casually reported this experience to my family. Their looks of mild concern lent me to keeping it to myself.

Yesterday, I spent the entire day as Gisele Bundchen. Even Michael never knew.

I’m not obsessed with celebrity, really, but I have always had a soft spot for the famous Brazilian supermodel/philanthropist who, eventually, married (then, un-married) “our quarterback”, Tom Brady.

And, I love football, have since we lived in New Hampshire and my dad watched his Sunday games while my sister and I made high tea in the kitchen. Delighted with every exquisite detail of Mom’s good teacups, giggling like crazy ourselves, we had our own madcap version of the Mad Hatter’s party. Mom was typically off with friends at a ceramics or painting class on her one meager day to herself. Mark, our little brother, disinterested in Lunatic Hatters, tardy rabbits, and silly sisters, trundled back and forth from the den to the kitchen in accordance with his five year old attention span.

Dad’s teams were my teams growing up and have remained so: Dallas and Green Bay — eventually, the New England Patriots. When I was a kid, I remember a huge picture book in our house called The Game. The cover jacket was an extreme close-up of the Pittsburgh Steelers soaked in mud up to their unmentionables in a slugfest/mud-fest with an unrecognizable opponent. There was a lot of mud. I wish I knew what became of that book; I’ve looked for it in my parents’ huge library but haven’t seen it in years. It was likely washed out to sea at Wells Beach — along with many of our belongings — in the Blizzard of 1978. You can get a library card or you can just go to my parents’ house — they have every book known to man and, yes, they’ve read them. Mom and Dad — all my family — are voracious readers. But, Mom, who grew up French and learned to speak English at age thirteen, never having had a chance to go to college, a thing she deeply lamented, was likely better read — in English, her second language! — than lots of people.

Back to Gisele. And football. As an adult I loved the New England Patriot’s quarterback, Drew Bledsoe. In 2001 I watched in horror alongside my dad when Drew’s grisly injury against the Jets was broadcast Live. Gisele’s husband-to-be stepped onto the field and into our communal psyches changing football forever and giving rabid New England fans twenty years of Goat Gloat.

What was it like to be Gisele for a day? Similar to being me, I guess, except, of course, I was Gisele. It wasn’t a remarkable day in terms of events, but, all day I exuded a radiance that can best be described as “being one with Gisele.”

I spent most of the day curled up on the settee in the kitchen parlor reading Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ Dreaming of Lions. If you haven’t discovered Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and love animals and wild places or simply reading about them, I cannot recommend her enough. She lived with, studied, then wrote about the hunter/gatherers of the Kalahari basin and other African peoples. Her experiences in these wild places are often riveting and always illuminating.

Lisa/Gisele loved being snowbound for only the second time this season in our quickly disappearing Maine winters, savoring our cup of ginger tea and getting up only eighteen million times to get or let dogs invariably lurking on the wrong side of any door.

At dinner time, Gisele and I unfolded our lanky selves and dutifully chopped shallots, bok choy, garlic and escarole, letting them all sizzle and carmelize for our “wok” dinner. Normally, at this time of day, I change my clothes. I began this practice during the pandemic and it has stuck. Typically, I spend most of the days of my life at school, in rehearsal halls, running, cycling, outside on beaches, and am in a work outfit, running wear or jeans during the daytime. Stuck at home for the pandemic, I was determined not to become a frumpy lump of an older woman. I began to “dress” for dinner. Nothing extravagant, just the “nicer” version of me. I love clothes, love to express myself through what I wear, and I’ve been lucky — with the exception of two completed pregnancies which changed my shape for a minute and my life forever — I’ve retained the same rather lithesome frame; lots of clothes I’ve had for a long time still fit.

     But, this evening, I’m Gisele, so, I don’t change. I remain her, wearing her jean skirt and her oversized, cashmere sweater. Later on, I climb onto the couch, drape my long legs atop Michael’s right thigh, curl my head into the crook of his neck, while he clicks all the right TV settings so we can see what those wacky scientists of Netflixs’ 3 Body Problem are up to. I am still Gisele. It is only when I head up to bed, slip off my stylish ensemble, pull on my UMaine Farmington pajama pants, fumble into my UMaine Black Bears T-shirt — two of my three alma maters — that I revert to plain old Lisa again.

But, I know in my bones, I was Gisele today.

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