New England Patriots [team stats] superstar Tom Brady [stats] may make headlines now, so is it any surprise that this Cali kid’s first job was slinging newspapers on doorsteps?
“I was a paper boy,” Tom told me at the grand opening of the rag & bone boutique on Newbury Street, where he and his beauteous bride, Gisele Bundchen, popped in after they caught the Red Sox [team stats]’ 100th anniversary game at Fenway.“How cute is that?” asked the giddy Gisele.
It’s pretty cute, seeing as Tom arrived for the party looking like he had just finished his shift tossing The Daily Bugle from his bicycle in late-1800s San Francisco.
Clad in a tan newsboy cap and navy grandpa sweater, his dark hipster glasses shining in the reflection of camera flashes, I half expected him to bust out in Christian Bale’s solo performance from “Newsies.” But a girl can dream, right?
While guests sipped Dewar’s and checked out the way-cool clothes, the first couple of football had a quick chat with friends David Neville and Marcus Wainwright, the wunderkind designers behind fashion line rag & bone.
The brand, which began as a denim line and has boomed into clothing, shoes and, as of this fall, handbags, is a favorite of girls and guys in the know. (That would include my fave Jersey boy, Bruce Springsteen, who popped by the store a few weeks ago when he was in town to play the TD Garden.)
But being in a new store with salespeople smiling ear-to-ear reminded me of how many of us slapped on a name tag and took a seat behind a register in our early years. I slung stilettos at a shoe boutique while in college. And after I graduated, I sold my blood. So I’ve got a few stories ...
Mrs. Brady told me how she copped her first paycheck. “I did a bridal catalog,” said the world’s richest supermodel. “I was, like, 13!” Now I’m sure Brazil is a lovely place, but I still can’t wrap my head around why a 13-year-old girl would be modeling a wedding dress, but whatever.
Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman, looking hunky as ever with his slicked-back hair and dressed in head-to-toe rag & bone, said he scored his first paycheck working for his old man’s auto parts company.
“I was a driver for my father’s shop,” Julian said of his teenage years in California. “A parts boy. I cleaned windows and vacuumed after every car was serviced.”Neville hauled furniture and boxes as a mover outside London.
“A buddy of mine had a van from his dad’s company and it said, ‘Man With a Van’ on it,” David said. To which I was like, ‘Wow, riveting.’”Wainwright, meanwhile, got his first taste of employment pushing hot dogs at the bear pits of Switzerland, a touristy spot kind of like a zoo.