Girls, Girls, Girls

Went out with Tennessee for dinner last night.  We ate at the Mexican restaurant because he wanted skinny, spicy margaritas.  We ate at the bar, of course.  The barmaid was from Brazil.  She was pure Portuguese though, with the highest cheekbones I'd ever seen.  I couldn't quit staring at them.  

"Are those real?" 

"What?"

"Your cheekbones."

"What?  My cheekbones?"

"Yea.  They look like implants."

She lit up.  "Nobody's ever said anything about my cheekbones."

She stuck around and talked as she made drinks.  Bartenders are like dancers.  They know how to make money.  T talked her up.  She wants to make photos with me now.  

T's my Pimp Daddy.  

Truthfully. . . I don't have much desire to follow up with these women.  I do, but I don't.  I kind of like the freedom of events and making pictures in the streets.  

I might as well use up the stage dancer photos.  I like them, of course.  They tell a story about who we are, where we live, why. . . .  People have different reactions to these images, but the story here compels me--the posture, the audience, the tats.  One day. . . . 

What can I say?  It was a biker town, a biker crowd.  This was a place of worship.  I understand, but I'd like to take photos of the rabidly religious, too.  If they were only having a festival near my own hometown that is so impossible for me to leave, I would go.  When everyone in your hometown looks like the Cleavers, a photographer could just about give up.  Oh, a photographer can take pictures of his cocktails and dinners and objects around the house, and he can chase after shadows and light, but only so many and so much.  But what he really wants is a shot at something shocking or bizarre.  Not always, but please, oh lord, give him a shot at the spectacular on ocaission.  

Especially if he's lived too long in isolation.  

Yea, I got out of town, and for a few moments they were dancing and a prancing and I was doing what I could.  I think I made a lot of photos for my very few hours out.  

If I had a studio now, I would just ask people with "a look" to come for a portrait.  I'd hand them a card and tell them they looked awesome and to come just as they were right then.  

Oh. . . I have so many fantasies about what I might shoot if I were this or that.  

"I want to take your picture, but I want you to think about a question as I do."

And I have a hundred questions to ask, some philosophical, some about memories, some seemingly inscrutable.  

"Why can't you just do it on the street?"

Yea, I know.  I told you I had fantasies.  You might not know it from reading me, but I am really very, very shy and full of self-doubt.  But that is a secret a lot of us keep to ourselves, isn't it?  

O.K.  I'll wrap it up before the laptop dies again.  I did o.k. today, though, and still have 35% of my battery left.  But the tiny computer fan has been running the entire time.  

Everything grows old.  Time and circumstance.  

George Shearing was a piano player, but he lets the vibes have this one for a long while.