As soon as I found out I’d be interning at InStyle, my boyfriend and I
rushed over to the grocery store to buy a celebratory copy. Plucking the May
issue from the magazine rack, I felt my heart race. I wanted to tell everyone
in Hy-Vee (shout out to the Midwesterners reading) that I was going to intern
at one of the most-read fashion magazines in the world. Cameron Diaz’s face had
never looked so good.
Except one month later, when I looked over and realized we
were walking side by side on a street in New York City .
My heart raced pretty fast then, too. I had just finished the first week of my
internship, and I was settling into a rhythm in and outside of work. The
actress looked even more glamorous in person; at 5’9” and wearing three-inch heels,
she towered over my 5’2” frame. Of course, I did what anyone who has never seen
a celebrity before does: I stopped dead in my tracks and gaped at her, while my
stomach dropped out of my body.
While I silently panicked, she just smiled her super-cool
Cameron Diaz half-smile as she turned the corner. Before I could sneak a casual
Instagram photo or even squeak out the words “I like your work,” she was gone.
Now, I have never considered myself celebrity-crazed, but standing just inches
from someone as famous as Cameron Diaz sparked an incredibly unique feeling
which I cannot describe any better than this: It’s like seeing a dead person.
That’s not to say that Cameron wasn’t attractive, because she was, but seeing a
person I’ve watched countless times on movie screens was like seeing a ghost. To
be honest, it scared me a little. It also made my week.
So went my first, but not my last, celebrity sighting.
Surprisingly, all of my sightings have occurred off the job. My day-to-day work
at InStyle is slightly less
glamorous, albeit not uninteresting. I work in the home and entertaining
department, which means I do what the fashion interns do, only with
home-related products. My duties consist of calling in products; organizing and
taking record of the products sent to us; and shipping products back to the
companies once we are finished with them. It’s a blast to see the kinds of
products that my editors have chosen for our readers and get a feel for the
pace of the publication. I’m hoping soon I’ll be able to attend a few meetings
and observe idea sharing, as well as the story-planning process.
In the meantime, I’m setting goals for myself, requesting
meetings with different editors and trying to soak up every experience I can
before my internship ends. (It is almost halfway over, after all!) I live for
our incredibly rewarding ASME lunches, where we get to hear from insightful,
seasoned editors from publications like O
Magazine and The New Yorker.
The best part about this summer, though, is that I’m
spending it in a fabulous city with an exciting job at a magazine, surrounded
by friends, old and new. Cameron Diaz included.
Taysha Murtaugh
InStyle intern
ASME 2012
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