trying on tara

I was fifteen. Maybe sixteen, depending on who asked me. I stood on 42nd Street—when it was still sketchy and fluorescent, all hustlers and peep shows, long before it got scrubbed down and Disneyfied (and worked as a Conde Nast editor at 4 Times Square!)—watching a man in a windbreaker run my picture through a plastic lamination machine the size of a loaf of bread. He didn’t look at me. I didn’t say much. He handed me a warm, crisp rectangular card with a photo of my teenage self and a new name: Tara Fitzgerald, age 21.