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Puerto del Sol

Editor’s Pick: Lexi Pandell | Prose


This is a Celebrity Profile


The Actress eats a vegan Caesar salad, her manicured fingers delicately grasping the handle of her long-tined fork. She places a single tender leaf in her mouth, raises a hand to cover her chewing, and blushes as if she, too, is surprised she requires sustenance to live. Passersby try not to stare. Before, she could have gone to a restaurant and eaten a vegan Caesar salad—even another kind of salad or possibly a burger—without anyone noticing. But the Actress is not just an Actress. Not anymore. She is now a Bona Fide Movie Star. And, now that she is newly Very Famous, I am here to scribble words into a notebook which will become a cover story.

Access (meaning a half-hour lunch) and the exclusive Cover Shot are granted only to outlets committed to fawning prose. It works out for the journalists who get $2 per word, the magazines which get newsstand sales bumps and web traffic at a time when subscriptions have dried up, and the celebrities who benefit from the sustained illusion of importance.

I want the piece to ascend that, to achieve greatness. Like “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” or the profile where the Journalist was invited to touch the Celebrity’s boob. But you can’t manufacture those things, they just have to happen.

To list the Actress’ films would be redundant because you already know them all. The Actress will next appear on screens near you in the newest superhero movie. She plays Girlfriend of Superhero, who accidentally eats radioactive jam and herself becomes a Superhero, though one who is also still a Girlfriend of Superhero.

“I feel a kinship with Girlfriend of Superhero,” the Actress says to me. “We have so much in common.”

“How so?”

“We’ve both eaten radioactive jam.” When the Actress giggles, all the on-screen versions of her crackle into view.

In real life, she seems natural, but not too natural. It’s a no-make-up look, except nobody has lashes that long or cheeks that precise shade of coral. Her skin glows in the way only a famous person’s does—I can’t explain it, but if you’ve met a celebrity, you know what I mean.

The Actress is blonde. No, brunette. No, blondish brunette-ish. Maybe a redhead in a certain light. She wears a black dress. No, a loose t-shirt with designer jeans. And a hat pulled low for privacy which, as it turns out, only draws more attention.

She is sweeter than she lets on, smarter. No one would guess how smart she is, considering she’s just a blondish, brownish, reddish haired girl that appears on their screens.

I know she’s smart because she says, “I read.” And from her inflection, I can tell she not only reads, but possibly even likes it.

“I hope that includes our magazine,” I joke. When she doesn’t respond, the joke dies and I laugh loudly as an attempt to resurrect it, but it’s too far gone.

My pen runs dry on the page of my reporter’s notebook. I shake some ink loose and continue.


*


The second section of a celebrity profile is where I would detail the Actress’ Backstory. The Actress was the child of a teacher or a biologist or a cashier or a dancer or a film producer or a farmer or…no, she was an orphan. Yes, an orphan. She knew she would be a star from the time she was a toddler. No, from the time she was scouted at a mall. Or perhaps she simply appeared and some Hollywood producer said, “You! Kid! You’re the one!”

She was born in 1990 or 1855 or 2001. She was born a minute ago. It doesn’t really matter. She is beautiful and she is younger than you, and that’s all you need to know.

She’s just like all of us, except for the part where she became nothing like us.


*


I ask the Actress about her relationship to Actor. He is Very Famous, and has been Very Famous for much longer than her. She evolved by his side like a butterfly or a Pokémon, baby cheeks chiseling down to sharp edges, wearing the clothes of elusive designers at all the major red carpet events.

“Is it true that you’re together?” I ask.

“Together, no,” she says. “Though I will always cherish what we had.” Only ice remains in her water glass. She unhinges her jaw and dumps the ice inside. She crunches it like a garbage disposal. When this happens, the ground shifts beneath me, but no one else at the restaurant reacts.

My fingertips feel damp. I discover my hand is bleeding beneath my pen, blood seeping through my skin. How strange. How inconvenient. Or maybe more convenient than I’d guessed because my pen has run dry again. I dip the pen into my blood and use that to write instead. It bleeds through the page—ha ha ha—but I’ll be able to read it.

Everything’s material, even bodily fluids.

The Actress flags down the server. Over the course of our lunch, the server has realized who the Actress is. Or he’s known all along and is only now letting it show. He flinches from her, even as he allows her to beckon him closer. The Actress orders a large pizza with five types of meat, plus chili sauce.

“I’m just a Normal Girl, you know,” she says. “I love to eat. I eat all the time. Everyday!”

“What’s your favorite food?” I ask.

“Steak and fries.”

“Do you exercise?”

“Never.” She laughs, then extends her arms like a pterodactyl. They seemed slender before, but they elongate further and further and, soon, they look as thin as telephone wires. “My publicist has begged me to go to Pilates with her, but that’s just not for me.”

Her face wobbles like pixels rearranging themselves. Pearls of sweat curl on my lip, my skin grows hot, my vision comes in and out of focus. I am like a teabag steeped in radioactive sludge. The Actress stares and I realize I’ve gone silent for a minute, possibly two. One fifteenth of my scheduled time with her vanished, eliminated, vaporized!

I return to my questions: “What’s in your purse?”

She presents her envelope-sized bag. She turns out the contents onto the table. Out flutters a dry cleaning coupon, tumbles a Chapstick, rainsticks a container of Tic Tacs, thunks a copy of War and Peace.

See? She does read.

The Actress says something. She sounds far away now, like I’m underwater, a teabag dunked down down down, but I don’t want to interrupt her because I don’t want to tell her I’m fallible, I don’t want her to stop talking, I don’t want to fail this assignment. I nod and nod and nod.

“Who is your celebrity crush?”

I read her lips: “George Clooney.”

“He’s much older than you.”

“He’s a chicken.”

“A what?”

“A spring chicken.”

“Oh, of course.” I laugh, as if I should have known that’s what she was saying all along. “A spring chicken.”

“A what?” she asks.

I sense a flash of heat behind me and the pizza slides in front of us.

“I’m starving,” she says—or, at least, I think she says. The cheese steams lava-hot, but she gulps a slice in three bites. Tip, middle, crust, and then gone. Grease and chili sauce glisten in the corners of her mouth as she grins. Because she was right: She’s not just an Actress, but also a Normal Girl.

I realize: It’s happening! The thing I wanted all along! The story opening up! This is how the piece will begin or…actually, this is how it will end. Yes, this is what we will build to. This and what comes next.

I examine the menu, curious about what she ordered so I can make note of it, but it’s not listed. She moves her hand toward me and her manicured nail slices through the paper like a claw. Because it is a claw. A talon, really. A gel coated one with a reverse French tip. The skin of her arm ruffles. Into feathers? No, an ocean. No, scales. No, something else entirely. Words fail me. I stop writing, though the pen remains slick with my blood.

She speaks. I lean closer. I can barely hear anything now. I lean closer and closer. Our noses nearly touch and I go cross-eyed looking at her. She’s nothing like what I thought, she’s everything like what I thought.

“Is this a metaphor for celebrity?” I ask.

“No,” she responds, and swallows me whole.



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A Moment with Lexi Pandell

 

PDS: Tell us a little about your writing process.

 

LP: My day job is as a freelance writer, so I sneak fiction into my evenings and weekends. I particularly love writing retreats, which give me dedicated time to generate big chunks of projects.

This story fell outside my normal process. I started writing it in early 2023 when I was laid up from breaking my leg. I was coming off of a slew of pain meds. I hadn’t yet shaken off the brain fog or my frustration with my circumstances. I was also in the midst of profiling a well-known subject for a big magazine. That profile subject was nothing like the Actress, as I hope I’m little-to-nothing like this story’s narrator. (Plus, I was interviewing my subject over Zoom rather than at a Chateau Marmont stand-in.) Still, the profiling process inspired me to return to this long-held short story idea. I was too loopy to write much at first, but I banged out what would become the opening and the skeleton of this piece. My sense of disorientation from that time certainly wormed its way into the story, too.

 

 

PDS: Who do you seek to represent or speak to in your work? In other words, what communities & people inspire you to write?

 

LP: I grew up as a neurodivergent only child in an isolated neighborhood. Reading and writing saved me from my loneliness, and gave me a lens through which to understand the world. So maybe it’s no surprise that, in my writing, I’m interested in misfits, gray zones, miscommunication, and alienation. I aim for my work to shift beneath you like a fault line as you read.


I also tend to write about women, specifically those who rebel against their circumstances in surprising ways and/or whose desire threatens to destroy them. I hope that other women who have felt pressure to “behave” or tone themselves down—whether in their writing or elsewhere in their lives—feel seen by my work.

 

 

PDS: This piece seems to be speaking to a meta or cultural conception around the concept of "Actress". This speaking to a concept of "Actress" is one of the great strengths of this piece, melding with its surreal imagery. What was your approach to writing a story that deals with a character who is more a generalized cultural conception, as opposed to the specific and "round" characters that we tend to see in short fiction?

 

LP: This story’s roots date back to when I was taking a class on profiling in journalism school. We were asked to bring in excerpts of profiles that exemplified excellent characterization. I flipped through countless magazines, just to find the same descriptions of half-eaten salads, well-manicured hands, and designer outfits, all of these journalists clearly forced to milk every mediocre detail from a half-hour lunch. Those reporters' desperation to write something worth reading was plain on the page. I understood their desire—and, as a journalist, I would experience the struggle of writing about sanitized interactions, too. In this short story, I wanted to blend the sameness of those profiles with the way celebrity strips famous people (especially women) of their selfhood. Celebrity is a monstrous thing, larger than any one person...but what if that celebrity was also a literal monster?


When you give characters a generic label, especially one as loaded as "the Actress," readers know in a flash who those characters are—or, at least, they think they do. I wanted to play into those assumptions while, at the same time, conveying the dehumanization of fame. I also wanted to create a sense of weirdness and disorientation. Labeling this character as “the Actress” gives a false sense of specificity, while actually keeping readers at a distance. Simultaneously, the first-person POV pulls them close into the wavering perspective of the narrator. When you start reading, you think you know the Actress but, as the piece progresses, that understanding fractures. That defamiliarization begins to feel as dangerous as the Actress ends up being. 

 

PDS: What are some books and writers that have influenced your writing style?

 

LP: The biggest influences on my fiction are A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and the short stories of Karen Russell (especially those in Orange World). But I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention There There by Tommy Orange, Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, and Out There by Kate Folk.

 

 

PDS: Do you have any tips or words-to-live-by that keep you motivated as a writer?

 

LP: The artists who succeed are the ones who don’t give up. Make time for your work, even if you have to borrow it. And, on days when it feels tough to write, “word vomiting” onto the page is enough—the good stuff comes during revision anyway.


(Oh, and don’t use your blood as ink.)


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Lexi Pandell is a writer from Oakland, CA. Her short stories have been published by Wired, The Pinch, Salt Hill, The Normal School, and others. She is the winner of New Ohio Review's 2022 Editor’s Prize for Fiction and was a 2020 Writing By Writers fellow. In 2023, she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is at work on a novel and a memoir.

 

Find Lexi Pandell on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) @lpandell and on Bluesky @lpandell.bsky.social

 

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