 Since signing to the agency in the summer, Jo has scored half a dozen bookings. His first gig was an appearance on the Australian version of the TV show Dirty Jobs. For $250 he got to lie on a slab and experience a fanny facial—a masseur scrubbed his sizable butt and then attached electrodes to it as the cameras rolled. The magazine Scientific American ran a story on global obesity and featured Jo in a spread wearing jeans and a T-shirt, a globe printed on his spilling girth. His best-paying gig (a princely $600) was as an extra in a skit for The Big Gay Sketch Comedy Show on Logo. The skit was a spoof of the Werner Herzog movie Grizzly Man; Jo got to play a gay bear. (He self-identifies as a “bear,” part of the subculture of big, hairy gay men who like other big hairy gay men.)
Reclining in his downtown Brooklyn apartment, his substantial load filling up an entire couch, Jo says he’s not bothered by being labeled ugly. “Americans are scared to offend people,” he says. “I don’t mind the name, because I know that I’m not ugly. A lot of big people are not comfortable with the way they look. I’m comfortable in my own skin. It’s about time companies realized that not everyone is 110 pounds.”
Jordanna James sits on a bed in a Herald Square apartment, her tiny legs dangling over the edge. She’s dressed like any other 19-year-old girl—jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers—though her clothes were purchased in the children’s department. She has a prominent forehead, short limbs, and fingers the size of pigs-in-a-blanket. She’s explaining why she dislikes the word dwarf.
“It makes us sound like fairy-tale characters,” she smiles. “And we’re not. We’re human beings.” This sounds odd coming from somebody who plays a fairy-tale character onstage at Radio City Music Hall. But if James dislikes dwarf, she loathes the M-word even more. “Whenever someone says the word midget, my stomach turns,” she says. She prefers the euphemistic phrase little person.
James suffers from a genetic condition known as achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism. She’s lucky because she’s healthy; some achons experience severe joint pain and have trouble breathing. Her condition hasn’t stopped her from forging a successful career as a dancer and performer.
Dwarfs are a hot commodity right now, thanks in part to TLC’s series Little People, Big World, which introduced viewers to a family of them. The Ugly agencies do a robust business in finding work for little people in the entertainment industry. “Back in London, I got about 50 dwarfs on my books,” says French. “Coming up to Christmas, the demand is incredible.” In Las Vegas a revue called Little Legends features the pint-size sensation Mini-Britney, a Britney Spears impersonator who some contend is a better performer than the real thing.
“With Little People, Big World and Mini-Britney,” says James, “I’m seeing a big change in the way little people are being accepted. I don’t think of myself as disabled. I’m happy being small. I’m different. Different is unique.”
Ever since she can remember, James wanted to be an entertainer. As a child she would dress up as the main character in her favorite movie, Matilda, and pretend to have magical powers. From an early age, she took ballet and tap-dance classes; later, she attended a performing arts high school. The history of dwarfs as entertainers is a troubled one. In the old days, little people were sold by their parents to circuses and freak shows, but today many of them, like James, choose to work as entertainers. Still, roles tend to be limited to comic relief or cutesy oddities. Rare is the actor like Peter Dinklage, who has managed to break out of the dwarf ghetto, playing Shakespeare’s Richard III at New York’s Public Theater in 2004.
James grew up comfortably middle-class in West Haven, Connecticut with three normal-size brothers, and while she never got tossed on a circus stage, she did endure her share of barbs. When she was 10, she recalls, a girl pulled her aside and asked, “ ‘Why are you wearing shorts? You should be wearing pants. Your legs are disgusting-looking.’ My legs are bowed—the outside bones grow faster than the inside. After that I didn’t wear shorts until I left high school.”
James accepts the fact that her achondroplasia limits her to certain kinds of work, and that in some ways it’s responsible for her getting work in the first place. And she’s enthusiastic about joining Ugly and getting different types of jobs. “They’re not like, ‘You have to lose 10 pounds,’ or, ‘You have to change your hair.’ They accept you for who you are,” she explains. “That’s the key to beauty…being yourself.” After a pause, she says, “This is the first time I’ve been in a magazine.” She couldn’t be happier about the way things are going. It’s not like any fairy tale, but her dreams are coming true.
At Industria Superstudio, the last of the talent has been photographed. Rogers and French are pleased with the turnout. “There’s a high percentage of people who are right for the agency,” Rogers says. A crew from Leopard Films came to film footage for a reality TV show pilot. Of the nearly 300 ugly people who turned up for the casting call, Rogers signed more than 40 new faces.
“Every culture has its own sense of beauty,” says Rogers. “We would like to break down some barriers, especially in America. You don’t have to be a size 2 and look like a Barbie doll to be beautiful.”
But it isn’t beauty that Ugly is trying to sell so much as weirdness. It’s the same quality that has drawn people to carnival freak shows for centuries. No one can look at a little person and not look twice, especially if he is in a Marilyn Manson costume. And maybe that’s the point. Victims of ugliness are turning it on its head and making it work for them.
And that is beautiful.
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