1 BRANDS, BRANDS, BRANDS! I guess you could say this whole thing started the day we tacked Ellen Hanks''s face to our vision board and began thinking seriously about how we could best take this incredible human being and turn her into a brand. Ellen Hanks was the face of Minneapolis''s Real Housewives franchise, and she had, just a few days before, approached People''s Republic Advertising about inte- grating her brand identities. PR was the best boutique agency in town, and Ellen needed our help. She''d launched a number of her own personally branded products--low-cal vodka, protein bites, and shapewear called Shape UP--but she felt these brands lacked inter-, intra-, and meta-coherence. They didn''t reflect, she said, her core values. She''d put us on retainer for what we were calling "co- hesive brand management," to not only support the growth of her consumer base but to add value to the life of each and every Ellen Hanks girl. Which is why we--Annie, Jack, Lindsey, and I, the crackerest-jack team PR had ever put together--found ourselves on that dreary March day puzzling over Ellen''s giant face and its implications. In fact, it was the Ides of March--I''ve always had a soft spot for days when famous guys got murdered--and I was wearing palazzo pants in the hopes of appearing more European.

Despite the freez- ing temperatures, I was also wearing open-toed shoes in the hopes of dressing for the weather you wanted, not the weather, in Minne- sota, you''d ever get. My best friend Susan once said my optimism bordered on derangement, and I told her they''d probably said the same thing about Gandhi. She''d said she doubted it, and I''d said greatness always seems deranged at first, which was something I thought about while writing in my diary sometimes, and a para- phrase of a quote I''d read on Pinterest. Together the four of us looked like an advertisement for the kind of glamorous urban life you could have if you went into adver- tising: three stylish and beautiful women, and a fetching gay. Well, it pains me to say that Annie wasn''t empirically beautiful, but when you put her with Lindsey and me you tended to, in your mind''s eye, gently round her up. "I am loving--" Jack said. He paused, placing one putting-the-man-in-manicured hand atop his checkered shirt, beneath his bow tie. " Loving what I''m seeing here.

" He was our team''s senior art direct∨ it was his job, in other words, to create the "visual ethos" for each branch (print, digital, film) of a brand''s campaign. "Uh-huh," Annie said, nodding. "Absolutely. Uh-huh." Annie was a copywriter, a fresh-faced twenty-three. Annie wore a lot of cardigans and was very diligent. She worked hard, much harder than the rest of us. She was talented enough to know she did not have a ton of talent; fear of unworthiness gave her a near-alarming level of commitment.

But by then I''d read enough books about fe- male leadership to know that true torchbearers ruled not by fear but inspiration, so I took Annie under my wing, complimenting her cardigans and praising her work and giving advice I don''t think she asked for but, I believed, might need someday. Annie returned this kindness with devotion, which only compounded my natural beneficence. She also didn''t mind, during long meetings, serving as an appreciative audience member for the rest of us as we waged our usual campaigns. "Here''s what we do," Jack said. "Full-page glossy, put it in O and Us Weekly, we airbrush the face, add a fan to the hair, then her name at the bottom with the logo." He blocked out the words in the air with his thumbs and index fingers. "ELLEN HANKS--" "Ellen Hanks," I said. "And then the tag.

''Housewives take no prisoners,'' or something." "Casey, enough with the tags. We don''t need a tag," Jack said. He was irritable that morning. His shih tzu, Johnny, needed eye surgery. "I think we might need a tag," Lindsey said, cringing. Lindsey cringed when she said anything controversial. She''d gotten an art degree at RISD, painting tiny dolls on china saucers.

A year or two after graduating, when it was clear she could not live by the bread of her Etsy store alone, she turned her saucer eyes toward advertising. Recently Lindsey''d gotten into what she called the Healing Arts. She drank weird glops out of mason jars and was always sug- gesting that I hold crystals and smell things. "Here," she''d say when I complained of fatigue, and push a tiny brown bottle my way. "It''s for energy." "So''s this," I''d say, and glug down an entire Americano. "We don''t need a tag," Jack said impatiently. "All we''re doing is creating brand recognition.

" I put my hands on my hips. "Yeah, but people won''t under- stand what the ad is for ." Jack put his hands on his hips, too. "So we''ll put the names of her product lines at the bottom." While we bickered, Annie looked back and forth between us like a cat trying to keep track of a laser pointer, bless her. When she watched, the part of me that felt I needed an audience to exist was, in that moment, satisfied. Jack and I went on like that for a while, more for sport than anything. Boredom crept into our edges like blackness on those old-timey photographs.

It was important for our mental health to keep it on the periphery. "We can''t just use her face, Jack," I said. "Her face alone doesn''t mean anything." "What are you talking about?!" Jack said. "Her face is her entire brand identity!" Finally Lindsey interjected. "You guys," she said, cringing. "Seriously, let''s chill for a second." "Fine.

Take it to the windows!" I flounced in that direction. People''s Republic took up the entire top floor of a downtown building, and the first thing people usually noticed were the floor- to-ceiling windows, complete with window seats and decorative pillows. "Take it to the windows," in PR speak, meant to take a break from whatever earthly problem or disagreement you were wrestling with. There were little shelves of organic snacks by the windows, and at the end of the day we often kicked back there with a glass of wine from the well-stocked Sub-Zero. The refrigerator and pillows and snacks--not to mention the couches and dart- boards and graphic prints on the wall (my favorite one said i like you), plus the sound of people bouncing tennis balls, deep in thought, on the concrete floor, and the whimsical doodles on the whiteboards--were all of a piece that added up to this whole idea that we should feel at home while we were at work. Or really that there was no difference between home and work--that work was fun! This is what we loved to brag about to our friends the most, friends who were stuck in less exciting jobs, slogging through Excel spreadsheets or legal briefs or outdated software at a non- profit that had seemed noble at twenty-two but at twenty-eight seemed poor and sad. We got to go to work wearing artfully ripped jeans and scribble on Post-its and stick pictures of reality TV stars to movable felt walls! And we got paid for it! In fact, we got paid quite a lot! Lindsey, Jack, and I made jokes about being sellouts when we went out drinking after work, which happened frequently: the joking and the drinking. I guess we wanted to prevent someone else from saying it first, something we all feared.

For me, that someone was my best friend Susan. We''d both been English majors in col- lege, where we met, and even now, almost six years after gradua- tion, I could feel her accusations boring into my skull. This? she''d say with her relentless blue eyes. This? We stayed up till three every night talking Marxist-feminist theory, and you''re writing campaigns for slimming underpants? Susan was the kind of friend where all she had to do was say "underpants" a certain way and I would double over laughing. I loved Susan more than anyone else in this world. Before I met her, I''d spent my whole life feeling a few clicks on the dial away from everyone I knew. Not that you could tell necessarily--I was popular and all that growing up, lots of friends, guys buzzing around like big horseflies--but there was this static in the air when I was around other people. Sometimes I''d even cancel plans, feigning illness, in order to stay home and read novels and fiddle with the antenna in my brain, trying to get a clear signal.

Sometimes I''d go days, weeks, without it, the dull hiss unceasing. The static only seemed to stop, or my brain could only tune in to the world prop- erly, when I was taking walks or reading novels. In other words, when I was alone. Oh well, I''d thought then, sucks for me I only get clarity by myself, everyone else seems to be getting on fine. Weirdo. Probably best to pretend that static doesn''t exist. That was right around the time I started partying, and exercising all the time. But when I met Susan I swear I could hear a low hum from somewhere deep below her rib cage that precisely matched the one in mine.

I was eighteen years old, and it was the first time I under- stood what it meant to be kept company. From the inside out, I mean, not just a warm body thing. I feel sad when I think about that sometimes, that it took so long, that my whole life I''d been lonely and didn''t even know it. But there''s joy in that too, a kidlike joy, like when you run home crazy thirsty after playing outside all afternoon and glug down a glass of water. You think, Jesus Christ, why''d I let myself get so thirsty in the first place? And also: what a relief. "I bet Ellen''s a bitch," Jack said. He was lying on his back on a window seat, knees knocking, his hands resting on his stomach like a Buddha. "On the show she''s such a bitch.