Until the house lights come up
In my quest to put some order to my life; which includes four other people and three dogs, so that is always a complicated endeavour, I was fixing a picture of RFK that Eamon bought when he went to Dallas a few years ago, to investigate JFK's assassination.
As I was re-taping the back of the picture I saw that beneath it, was a photo taken of my group of friends from "the college years" I was sitting in the middle of three couples, and Eamon was the photographer. This picture is up on a mirror, so as I'm looking at it, I see myself, and with that I started to laugh.
The two potent things about the picture are;
1) I was the connection between all of those people, so being in the middle was certainly apropos. 2) I was lovely.
That's when I really let loose; a lifetime of worry about my looks and all I had to do was look on the mirror.
As I was re-taping the back of the picture I saw that beneath it, was a photo taken of my group of friends from "the college years" I was sitting in the middle of three couples, and Eamon was the photographer. This picture is up on a mirror, so as I'm looking at it, I see myself, and with that I started to laugh.
The two potent things about the picture are;
1) I was the connection between all of those people, so being in the middle was certainly apropos. 2) I was lovely.
That's when I really let loose; a lifetime of worry about my looks and all I had to do was look on the mirror.
posted by Abby O'Neill at 10:51 AM
2 Comments:
a spoke in the wheel
sometimes i look at album covers from the eighties. indy records, of course. the band photos look like my friends. the beat happening or the feelies, for example. what we looked like and wore in those days—stained t-shirts, thrift-store sweaters, asymmetrical haircuts or just plain dorky, homemade hair, large-rimmed glasses—were the same clothing and haircuts the bands we listened to wore. the pictures also seemed taken in the same moments. squinting into a bright sky standing on the beach. a cool looking field along the side of the road. the apartments and the stuff in the background were the same houses and rooms we lived in, furnished with the same stuff salvaged out of dumpsters, from alleys, from our parents’ basements and attics. the photographer was always a friend of the band, or a self-timer set up by one of the band members. none of my friends were in bands, really. friends of friends were, of course, and there were college-radio djs among us. oh, we were all creative-types of some sort, just not a band per se. but the pictures of my friends were the same as these pictures on album covers printed in canada and paid for with waitressing tips or credit cards. we didn’t need to be in a band to look like the bands we listened to and we didn’t even try to look like them. we just needed to share the same camaraderie, love the same things, and have the desire to document it. i’m sure the same romances, breakups, fights, distances, reconnections, interconnections, and heartbreaks circulate through the band pictures that i can recognize in ours. if the bands are lucky, they also still have a hub connecting all the spokes.
pt dismal
Wow.
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