Mean Girls Musical: Regina's Bedroom, Closet, and Home

REGINA’s BEDROOM

Jess and me just as we were finishing the Regina bedroom set.

Of course reinterpreting the living space of such an iconic character like Regina George is daunting.

The name, Regina George, itself has become a byword for an archetype of female that has different shades of meaning depending on who you are talking to. Getting it right would mean a lot to a lot of people and there’s so many directions it could go.

• How would her mean-ness be expressed in her bedroom space?

• Is it just about her family being richer than other kids in her community?

• Is her character expressed in interior design status symbols?

• Do teens have bedroom interior design status symbols?

• What’s the perfect mix of girly and fierce but not cute to accurately present Regina’s style and personality?

• How on-trend and cutting edge would the bedroom of a 16 year old living in the suburbs of Illinois realistically be?

Just some questions we thought about and discussed AT LENGTH a ton.

Jessica Petruccelli the set decorator came up with brilliant concepts and ideas from the beginning of the project (e.g. lots of plastic for the queen bee of The Plastics!).

In the background on the left you can see Jessica’s intial vision and moodboard for Regina’s room behind her desk, and in the foreground on the black board you can see our working board of options and ideas in front of my desk.

INCEPTING THE MIND OF AN AMERICAN TEENAGE GIRL

It has been a long time since I was a teenage girl: about three decades.

When that much time has lapsed your sensibilities and design instincts have naturally evolved with your age. The visual representations of teenage girlhood that are most resonant to you are artifacts from another era, a nostalgic memory of a different epoch.

In other words, it only makes sense for you, a woman in your 40’s, to be literally out of touch with teenage girl aesthetic desires.

So how to close that gap and try to represent teenage girlhood in 2024 accurately?

After Jessica, the set decorator, and Kelly, the production designer, nailed down the design concepts and ideas in conversation with the directors, Jess and I had to flesh out what that meant in the concrete details.

So I did a bunch of research to make sure we got the details right.

So on top of tons of googling I:

1. read trend reports

2. got on the phone and interviewed actual teens

3. Spent a lot of time on teens giving bedroom tours on TikTok

4. Went to the local mall and interrogated the teens selling clothes to other teens.

Here’s a glimpse of some of the teens giving tours of their bedrooms TikTok screenshots I took as research and reference.

In the original version of Mean Girls released in 2004, there’s a few scenes in the mall. In 2024, the mall is no longer the essential site of teenage girlhood that it once was.

And while many malls are closing we were in New Jersey, the promised land of malls, and this mall was still going so I decided to go in person and shop at the mall like a teen.

A lot of times it is easier (though slightly more tedious) to shop in person rather than online. For me though, going in person had the added benefit that I could observe what teens were buying or looking at and talk to the teens or young people selling to teens.

I’m so grateful for the teens working at the clothing and shoe stores at the mall. I would ask them to think of the meanest and most popular girl at school (the Regina George in their life) and describe to me what she was wearing.

Because they would narrow down what were the best selling and hot items and I would start selecting. They would watch me chose and gently tell me “no, not those colors.” “not those styles” and I quickly learned whatever I thought was most appealing or looked cool was exactly the opposite of what teens actually liked.

It was jarring to realize that whatever you are inclined to, it is the actual inverse of what kids like.

If you want to feel old, I recommend this exercise to you!

swatching a lot of pink fabrics and wallpapers.

Custom Made Headboard the Swing Cushions

some key elements of Regina’s room we had custom made and here they are in their workshops in progress.

Regina’s room from the original 2004 movie

Regina’s Closet

Particularly daunting was filling Regina’s closet.

A hero female character’s closet as a reveal is always meant as something of a show of force. Think Carrie Bradshaw’s different closets, Cher’s closet in Clueless, and even Peik Lin’s (Awkwafina’s character) closet in Crazy Rich Asians.

When closets are featured like that on screen they almost take on the mythical stature of a Nancy Meyer kitchen. So yeah, the pressure was on.

As set decorators, we are used to thinking in terms of furniture and decor to express characters, context, and story and not clothes. Usually that’s the costume and wardrobe department.

But when an open closet becomes a set, filling it with the right clothes becomes set dressing and not costume and wardrobe!

We really worked so hard on this: on each and every detail (though I will say the beauty and makeup items were dictated by product placement powers greater than ours).

The teenage girl who actually lived in this house, went through the closet with us when were finished and was filled with longing and desire for most of the pieces (so that was gratifying).

set dressers Karl and Pat working on the photo cut outs we used for Regina’s bulletin boards.

ARTWORK FOR REGINAS HOME

Thinking about artwork for Regina’s mom, “not a regular mom, a cool mom” who is that special mix of zany, desperate, and brightly energetic, was fun.

In this one shot you see a lot of the artwork but the space we were filling was so much bigger (which you never see) and below is the sheet I used to help myself keep track of all the pieces.

Mean Girls Musical: Cady's Tent in Kenya

After a little garage prologue with Janis and Damien, the new Mean Girls movie opens in Kenya (as opposed to unspecified “Africa” like in the 2004 version). In the opening musical number Cady runs through her home: the tent she shares with her mom presumably on the plains of Kenya (or New Jersey).

A tent that looks like the kind of tents for safaris in Kenya, but not a glamping luxury tent, and fits the spacial needs of filming does not exist.

We had to have it custom made and shepherding the birth of this custom tent is something I worked on for almost the whole time up until shooting!

I wish I had some stills from this scene in the movie but alas they are not in any of the trailers.

I learned a ton about the safari and custom canvas tent industry and how there are actually a few companies in Kenya and South Africa that will custom make and ship to you!

International shipping is always a gamble with hard shooting timelines that are short, so fortunately in the end we found a vendor in America who was perfect.

When we were working out the needs and possibilities of the tent. That post-it was the planned choreography, and we made little origami tents to discuss the options.

We asked for huge skylights for ease of lighting and shooting, and after building our custom tent for the first time, we had some add on requests.

One of them was an add on divider in this very specific dimension. The idea was so unfunctional for most tent customers that the vendor had no idea what I meant until we drew this little scribble over the photo.

Cady’s mom is a research zoologist, so we had to imagine a field research tent that a professional scientist lives and works out of as well as shares with her daughter.

We tried to think very hard (and do lots of research!) about what those details would look like for her desk and I think Jess did an amazing job. I just contributed research and finishing details to this portion of the set.

Since this movie version of Mean Girls locates Cady and her mom specifically in Kenya, we were thinking of ways to reflect the specificity of Kenya in the items in the tent, and one of course is food. The other is textiles and we do have a quite a few specific Kenyan textiles in the tent but lets stay focused on the food.

So I visited small African food groceries, which in New Jersey primarily cater to immigrants from West Africa and nothing specifically from Kenya. Though when I saw British food products that are popular in the post-colonial British empire world, I picked up a few of those items.

And that’s how I found myself one early morning at the warehouse of a specialty African importer (photo below).

After doing lots of research (I was trolling through the Carrefour Kenya website), I figured the specifically Kenyan, made in Kenya, food item that was most visually clear and which made sense for someone to store in a tent were these Kenylon brand Njahi beans.

YAY!

oh wait, but how am I going to find them in America? The warehouse I visited were out of stock on this particular moment at the time!!!!!!!!!!

So after a lot of calling around and googling, I found an importer in Maryland who shipped them to me in time, they made them into the set, and you know what? THEY MADE THEM ON SCREEN!

In the first 5 min of the film, if you are paying close attention when Cady is singing and running through her tent you will see the Kenylon Njahi Beans on screen! If you are me (or maybe now you after reading this) you will yelp for joy and triumph for a can of just the right beans detail to locate Cady and her mom in Kenya in the background.

"In the Heights" blood, sweat, tears and lots of joy

The set decorating team for “In the Heights” in the beauty salon set.

The beauty salon set during the number “No Me Diga.”

In the summer of 2019, I had the great opportunity to work on the movie version of the Broadway musical “In the Heights” with set decorator Andrew Baseman.

It was truly one of the most fun projects I have ever worked on and spending the summer immersed in the community of Washington Heights was such a treat and a joy.

set decoration team in the Bodega set

While working on “In the Heights” is absolutely one of the highlights of my set decorating career so far, it didn’t come without it’s blood, sweat, and tears. Literally:

BLOOD: when I fell down a flight of stairs in a dark basement at a used book store in my excitement to buy some used vintage Spanish-language cookbooks for Abuela’s home set. So not exactly blood, but bone spurs and arthritis in that ankle ever since…More on that saga later.

Sweat: in the peak of NYC summer is always hot, but I remember paritularly in early July when we were working on the set for Vanessa’s apartment we were in a third floor apartment with no air conditioning and it was BRUTAL. We survived by buying batches and batched of fruit popsicles from the bodega downstairs. I took this photo in my minivan when it felt like every pore in my body was sweating.

TEARS: ok, I don’t have a picture of moment where I felt hot tears of extreme frustration well up in a crammed chaotic fabric store where we were having a huge language barrier (it is totally my fault for living in America and not speaking Spanish—I really wish I had learned Spanish and not French in high school. Languages spoke at this store: Spanish and Korean, neither of which I speak) and I was under lots of time pressure to buy something quick and bring it back to set on a Friday at 4pm. Did i mention it was really hot that summer? At that moment I was like omg I feel so frustrated I feel like I’m going to cry, and then that line from Tina Fey’s memoir “Bossy Pants” floated through my mind where she said “if you feel like you’re going to cry, just cry, it freaks everyone out” It isn’t my proudest moment, but sadly yes, some tears were shed in the process of working on this movie.

There were also moments of transcendent joy and wonder too.

Like the time Andy and I were working on the Rosario Car Service set, and I looked out the window to the wondrous sight of a bunch of dancers practicing the opening number in the intersection in gorgeous perfect golden sunlight.

All the dancing was so captivating we stood outside to watch, and we couldn’t help but smile in awe. Pictured here with Assistant Art Director Brian Goodwin and Set Decorator Andy Basemen.

what we saw

What the camera saw

Or the time I met Andy at 4:30am in the dark one Monday morning to work on dressing the courtyard set for the dance number “Carnaval del Barrio” filming that day and got to stay and watch a few of the rehearsals.

I think “Carnaval del Barrio” is the most exuberant dance number in the whole movie and getting to see and feel some of that energy upfront firsthand is a memory I will always cherish.

It was also my first time seeing Lin-Manuel Miranda himself in person! (yes we are totally best friends now after quickly passing him and then seeing him watch rehearsals 100 feet away from where I was standing).

what we saw watching from one corner off set (I think you can actually see LMM in this photo).

what the camera saw

If you ever need a quick injection of pure joy, I highly recommend watching this dance number—I can almost guarantee it will have you smiling and wanting to dance

The whole Art + Set Decoration Department pictured in front of the stage built version of the boedega.

Thank you Andy for asking me to join the set decoration team! You can see many more great photos of the set on Andy’s website here.

You can watch the whole opening number and first 8 minutes of In the Heights yourself below:

The Quest to Find All that Shredded Paper

Cassie and Alex in her mind palace of trying to piece together what those shredded pieces of paper mean.

In episode 4 “Conspiracy Theories” of The Flight Attendant, after Cassie stole the shredded paper remains from Janet Sokolov’s office in episode 3, we see her wrestling with all this new and puzzling information in her mind palace space/subconscious with Alex. They are back in the hotel suite but now it is is COVERED with shredded paper.

Cool idea. But when set decorators read a scripted idea like that we think “!!! going to need to find or make tons of shredded paper!”

One of the cool things about set decorating is, it is translating a scripted idea from the writers or design idea from the production designer into an actual physical reality. And sometimes it is the simplest things that are the most challenging. Honestly often it is.

Shredded paper: sure anyone knows how to find that. You go to Staples, you buy a home office paper shredder and shred some paper. Done.

But once you start getting into larger quantities, the kind of quantities to make a cinematic effect and really
”read on screen” like in the shot above, it becomes a lot more challenging. Quantity is a big thing when finding things for sets—I could write a whole thing on that but I won’t right now.

I often say it is being able to buy things in the quantity needed, on our crazy production timelines (need it yesterday), with a limited budget that makes set decorating a profession versus someone who is good at shopping, has a knack for interior design, or is resourceful.

In this case, I’m going to walk you through what a challenge it was.

Jess (THE set decorator for The Flight Attendant) and I talked about how our dream situation was we would find a vendor who already dealt in industrial quantities of shredded paper we could buy mass amounts of shredded paper from (I’m talking 1000 pounds of shredded paper to be exact) that we simply picked up or they dropped-off.

I believed deep down inside that I must be able to find this dream vendor.

little snapshot of the calling journey I took from my work notebook (on the other side was my list of things I was buying for an entirely different set. We are usually working at multiple sets at a time concurrently).

So I started googling and calling around all the shredded paper vendors in the NYC tri-state area. Quickly I discovered this was going to be tougher than I realized because what these companies sell their customers is security and peace of mind re: disposing sensitive documents. All of them said flat out no way were they going to sell me their old shreds—that would violate their whole confidential promise to their customers.

Think about it, why do you want to shred something? Because you have a document you want safely and simply destroyed. (Why did Janet Sokolov shred those documents in her office? To destroy evidence!)

Cassie uncovering the shredded documents in Janet Sokolov’s home office in Episode 3 (another set Jess and I worked closely together on!)

Okkkkk. So we discussed the possibility of renting some industrial size paper shredders, bringing them to our set dressing shop, buying obscene amounts of new paper, and then asking for the manpower hours required to have a few set dressers going to town shredding all that new paper.

We didn’t love this plan for three reasons:

1. omg why waste all this NEW paper (and squander the lives of millions of trees in the process) when the world and certainly New York City is already filled abundantly with people disposing of already used paper?!

2. New paper would lack the texture and dimension that used paper with writing and graphics and different color has. This plan costs way more money (renting the machines, buying the material, and budgeting for the manpower).

3. And lastly, renting an industrial shredder is possible but not as easy as we had hoped. Nowadays most companies who hire one of the paper waste companies get a service where someone comes to pick-up paper meant for shredding which then gets hauled and shredded in an industrial paper shredder truck.

I asked a few companies, what if I provide all the paper, could I hire you guys to shred it in your truck, but the truck just parks outside of our office and when it is done shredding we just take the contents? They all said no to this option citing that the trucks are often filled with multiple client’s paper so they can’t just give us our paper and anyways they don’t do that.

Feeling a bit stumped I even called a few other set decorator friends working on other productions to see if they had done something similar before and had any vendors they’ve used. They all said no and thought the best option was the DIY method (the one we didn’t love for the reasons stated above.)

…I really believed there MUST be the right paper shredding vendor out there. You know maybe a smaller firm less bound by all these corporate contracts, someone with a little more flexibility to cater to this very specific situation…

And just as I was giving up hope I got the call back from a vendor with whom I had left a message on their voicemail. He heard my message, googled this new show “The Flight Attendant” and saw that Kaley Cuoco was starring and his wife loves Kaley! He’s the owner of his paper shredding solutions company in New Jersey, had that can-do spirit that small business owners do, and believed he could deliver what we were hoping for. YAY!!!!!!!!

[I wanted to embed the GIF of Ari Gold from Entourage doing his “I LOVE THIS TOWN"!” celebratory dance after realizing he could negotiate with an intransigent school principal once he realized the principal’s son was interested in working as an agent, but I couldn’t make it work with this website’s interface]

THE HIGH. THE BEST HIGH. When that crazy quest you’ve been on finally sprouts a good lead. I’ll never forget how pumped Jess and I were in the office after I got off that phone call that evening.

I worked out all the price and delivery logistics with my Paper Shredding Guy, his company was going to deliver 1000 pounds of shredded paper to our stage two working days before we needed to film. Great, I can check that off my list.

But of course it is never that easy.

Friday Feburary 14, 2020 I was on location working on the set for Diana’s office (another set I was in charge of) and it was surprisingly a pretty chill day considering the high stress few months proceeding it. (Also little did we know what a calm before the storm it was considering what was about to engulf all of our realities COVID wise in just a few weeks).

Literally kicking back on set at Diana’s Office (Annie’s boss at the law firm) which we were dressing the morning of Feb 14, 2020 and which I was using as my desk to get some work done.

The actual intended use of the desk in the show. (I would like to note that all those awards in the background were custom engraved with the character’s name all sorts of fake honors I made up for her.)

Jess came to set, we were both relaxed in a way we hadn’t been in weeks. We even had time to go do some fun smalls shopping together for the finishing touches of Diana’s office at NYC’s most fun office supply store Goods for the Study.

We are all enjoying life cracking jokes with the set dressers dressing Diana’s set with us, and then we get The Call.

Sara the Production Designer calls us from the stage where they are dressing in the 1000 pounds of shredded paper that have been delivered from our Paper Shredding Guy. Sara says with slight panic, the shreds are not the right shape. It is Friday afternoon, and we are filming this first thing Monday morning.

The shreds the props department created for what Cassie stole from Janet Sokolov’s Office are straight shreds—the kind you get from a simple home office paper shredder. The kind of shreds we currently had 1000 pounds of were cross-cut shreds.

Knowing very little about the details of the paper shredding Jess and I honestly didn’t understand this distinction until Sara sent us a photo. OH. This distinction was something that was never specified to any of us and not one we even knew to ask. (I learned so much about the paper shredding industry that week).

I called my Paper Shredding Guy to see if he could help us. He said “That is the industry standard you know: cross-cut. Cross-cut shreds are what most effectively obscure and destroy sensitive documents because they are much harder to piece together.”

Yeah, exactly. If the shreds were actually cross cut, maybe it wouldn’t have been so easy for Cassie and Max to reconstruct the strip shreds they stole from Janet Sokolov’s office:

The strip shredded paper Max and Cassie were able to piece back together in Annie’s apartment on her shower door (I had to find this unique custom curve shower door but that’s a whole other post)—this is exactly why you don’t strip-shred—its too easy to piece back together—and the industry standard is cross-cut.

And like with so many vendors I’ve had this talk with before I pleaded with him: “I know this doesn’t make sense in real life or in how it actually works in your industry, but can you help us make a bunch of strip shreds to support the fake cinematic world we are creating? Could you also make 500 pounds more and deliver it by Monday morning at 5am?“ (we thought we could layer some of the crosscut under the strip shred for bulk—a little movie magic.)

Like I said before Paper Shredding Guy is a can-do guy and for the right price he said sure he could help us out.

But considering our thin time margin of working hours left, we were going to be cutting it very close (haha paper shredding pun!). We all agreed we needed a Plan B. Because relying on a third party to deliver something we needed to make the shot on Mon at 5am was a risky Plan A. Any number of things could go wrong and we needed a back-up.

So now Jeanelle, the other assistant set decorator joined our little Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force to try and figure out how we were going to come up with 1000 pounds of strip shreds before Monday morning. Did I mention it was late Friday afternoon by this point? The Friday of Valentines Day when many people have plans with their dearest loved ones and are not planning on working a minute later than absolutely necessary?

We revisited some previous plans and I called the places we had inquired about renting industrial paper shredders. Turns out any industrial size paper shredder only cuts cross-cut. Strip shreds are only for little amateur home paper shredders. AGHHHHHH.

I called a bunch of Staples around the city to find out how many strip-shred home paper shredders they had in stock now, and it turns out VERY FEW. Most of that is sold online now, and as anyone who has had experience with a dinky home paper shredder they are not that durable.

In order to make the quantity of shreds we needed, we needed a bunch of these dinky little shredders so that if one died from exhaustion (sorry paper shredder) we had another waiting in the wings. Also we needed enough so that we could have a small army of set dressers shredding all at once. I mean, 2 guys and 2 shredders was not going to cut it (HAH! another paper shredding pun!) Thankfully production agreed to let us pay a handful of set-dressers a 6th day rate to staff the Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force Paper Shredding Factory.

Online though, wasn’t going to be fast enough. We needed these shredders now. So that first thing Sat morning the Paper Shredding Army could get to work.

In the end Jeanelle found a guy who sold on Amazon but had a warehouse of 20+ strip shred home office paper shredders in New Jersey (NJ to save the day again) and could deliver them all in a van to Brooklyn that evening. Katie our set dec shopper was able to procure the obscene amount of paper we needed for the Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force Paper Shredding Factory.

Here is a video of Jeanelle coming into the office at 7:04 pm (you can see the rest of the office is dark and everyone else has long gone home) with one of the paper shredders that had been delivered just to test that it would work.

The huge sigh of relief we all breathed.

In the end my Paper Shredding Guy DELIVERED. He showed up Monday 5am with the 500 pounds of strip-shredded paper as requested and together with the shreds from the Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force Paper Shredding Factory we were able to create the beautiful quantity required to make the shot in time for camera.

PHEW

The Quest + the Intense High Stakes Problem Solving are two things I actually love. So even though they are less about beautiful objects and the design aesthetic side of set decorating (which duh is the best part), they are processes I really enjoy and which keeps me loving set decorating.

A Wrap on "The Flight Attendant"

(This is not even all the scripts or all my set files—just the ones that were stashed in a file cabinet 🗄 before March 12!)

The end of a job that stretched out over four seasons because of a pandemic. There’s always that surge of relief at the end of a job but also a twinge of sadness that all of a sudden it is over and the people you were used to seeing and texting all day long and the routes you drove on autopilot are done.

One of my proudest achievements on this job, however, is that I managed to find all the things we needed, within budget and on our crazy timelines WITHOUT once going to HomeDepot or ULINE from August-October (when we started back up after the COVID imposed break). This is something I’m truly proud of.

This past summer (2020) when many of us decided we would be more intentional about how we spent our money: investigate who it supports, doesn’t support, or harms, it felt imperative to cut out spending money at HomeDepot or ULINE. Especially when we are working with substantial budgets shopping frequently at home improvement and hardware stores (like HomeDepot) and wholesale bulk suppliers (like ULINE.)

Because of set decorating work, I can map all the HomeDepots in the NYC and vicinity for you off the top of my head and know the layouts of all the one main ones in New York City by memory.

Our art department coordinator on “Russian Doll,” Mia, did educate me on all the ways ULINE works against many feminist causes, and encouraged me to rethink supporting them back in 2018. …it was so hard to disavow them though, cause ULINE is so convenient. They reliably will ship you something by next day if you get the order in by 6:00pm, they have an amazing selection and good prices, and great customer service…

And same with HomeDepot, they have good parking lots, PARKING LOTS! all around New York City (which is huge when you are driving around a minivan and need to get a lot of things), a much better website and app than Lowe’s, locations everywhere, and unbeatable hours.

…but after this summer I decided despite it all, I really wanted to stick to my commitments of more intentional alignment with companies and try my best when working to not support either HomeDepot or Uline. Thankfully Jessica, the decorator for The Flight Attendant, was totally on the same page about this and supported and encouraged me to try.

I knew it would be harder and more inconvenient and I would have to rethink old default patterns of buying things. But we managed to do it for the last three episodes of The Flight Attendant. We had one set in (you’ll see once it airs and I’m able to post a behind the scenes about the set) which would have definitely been 10x easier with ULINE, but I found a competitor that got the job done! And as for avoiding HomeDepot, New York City actually has a bunch of old school hardware and building supply companies all around and I rediscovered the wonders of Metropolitan Lumber (a place I first starting using back when I was working on The Affair in 2016), which I came to learn has pretty much everything you need!

I never used either place once, which gives me encouragement that it is possible for all work moving forward.

The Flight Attendant airs on HBOMax on Nov 26!

Used Milk Crates Treasure Trove

Wanted to buy a large selection of colorful used milk crates that were in our color palette so after some internet sleuthing found this guy who seemed to have a lot.

Went to meet the guy, a retired cop, and discovered he has a thriving second-hand crate business (he has sold almost 4,000 since he started the business 3 years ago) and has sold to crate collectors (a real thing!) in Japan, Germany, and beyond.

He told me of the almost 4,000 crates he has sold he’s only seen 5 yellow ones and I took 2 of them! 🐥🌼⭐️🌝☀️🍋💛love meeting niche businesses like this and the people who run them—one of the funnest parts of the job.

In the Heights!!!!

Super excited to start on the movie version of the Broadway musical “In the Heights” shopping for Set Decorator Andy Baseman.

This is my first big studio film and first musical so really looking forward to all the new things I will learn.

Designer Bags on Canal Street

Worked on a pilot last year at this time about the high fashion world and just remembered this hilarious experience shopping for designer bags. I felt conflicted about posting this or not when it happened, because of the legality of buying imitation designer bags, but since the pilot hasn’t aired yet, feels like it is fine.

Had the funnest and funniest peak Chinatown Canal St experience.

I needed to find eight or so different purses in the manner of the hottest luxury designer bags for a set I’m working on. Buying them was out of the question, even renting the real thing was out of the question budget wise (it is like $500 each to rent a real designer bag!), and no brands wanted to product place with this pilot.

So I walked to the intersection of Canal and Centre St and approached two middle aged ladies loitering at the corner. I asked them if I could buy purses and they gave me a nod of “yeah we got that.”

They asked me what kind and I showed them some reference photos—looking at the photos they were like oh those are the latest styles we don’t have those yet.

So then we switched to Chinese and they asked me if I wanted “A” level purses the kinds that are super good almost indistinguishable knock offs that are $300-$500 each. I said nah I just need regular quality that will look convincing in the background.

So one lady Ms. Ye took me a block or two away to another young woman who I showed the photos I brought. She said they didn’t have that and then quickly darted away to surreptitiously finish another transaction 20 feet away.

Ms. Ye was getting annoyed with me and asked me how many I needed. And I tried to explain in more detail what I needed and she brought me across the street to another guy Mr. Hai standing in Canal St who started showing me photos on his phone.

Mr. Hai. He knew what was up he got what I was looking for and we browsed the catalog of bags he had on his phone and chose 8. The whole time Ms. Ye is standing a few feet away as the look out.

I’ve been on the street the whole time.

We are getting close to closing the deal but I want to send photos of the photos to my boss for approval, so all three of us walk two blocks up away from canal behind some phone booths so I can use my phone to take photos of his photos.

Boss likes them we are good to go, I go get my car and pull up to near the warehouse door and then I realize oh no I need more cash.

These are Chinese entrepreneurs—they don’t mess around so Mr. Hai offers to sit in my car for me since I’m illegally parked while Ms. Ye offers to escort me to the closest Bank of America. We all trust each other somewhat now after spending the last 20+ min working out this deal together so ok sure. We get that done. Ms. Ye walks me to the bank and waits outside.

She’s from Wenzhou and she’s going back in 20 days to visit her 80+ year old parents for Chinese New Yesr. Mr. Hai is from Hangzhou. She told me there is a new police person on counterfeit bags duty and not everyone knows what he looks like but word on the street is he already made his rounds for the day.

We head back, I get inside the car Mr. Hai gets the bags, brings them to the car sits in the passenger seat and we look over the merchandise together. Looks great! Like really impressive for the price. I give him the cash, we work on the receipt I need to turn in, and we become Wechat friends then he gets out the car and leaves.

You guys I loved every minute of it.