Too Many Martini, Pancakes and my Fireman

So I drank too much last night. Again. You’d think that ONE martini wouldn’t be too much. Well, actually, it was served in a martini glass the size that is usually neon with a blinking olive. My cousin Vicki is visiting with her friend Barb, so we went to eat at Nirvana, on Castro. Nirvana is always filled with cute twenty-somethings of unnatural hair color and at least one visible piercing each. Vicki chatted engagingly about vivisection (Vicki is a lab technician working with rats and Alzheimer drugs) and her boyfriend. Vicki is dating this hunk of mid-western farm boy. He says he’ll never marry her, that he just wants a lifelong girlfriend. And he cooks, too. She wants a ring, so she’s signed up for a dating service that’s kind of like musical chairs, where 40 men and women gather in a room and conduct 3-minute interviews with each other. Potential lifemates are matched and e-mails exchanged. I say keep a side of farmboy and his homemade pancakes. They just left, Vicki and Barb, for a day at the Alemany flea market. The last time I was at the flea market, in 1997(?), I saw my fireman, sans shirt–a big balding hairy slice of chocolate cake. I had seen him around town for several years, and never had the guts to introduce myself, or at that time, the excuse of wanting to photograph him. Well, several weeks later, he showed up at the LAB auction, and was the winning bidder of MY photograph! I buzzed right over to my sweet fuzzy 220 pound flower and introduced myself as the creator of the image that he just bought, and, thinking fast, asked if he’d let me photograph him. He actually said yes, and I thought, “This is what I’m going to do for a living.” I came up with an idea about photographing every inch of his body, as a way of getting access to it without violating my marriage vows, and with no idea of what I was going to do with the images. Unfortunately, he bailed out after the first session, unfortunate also because we had started at the top and didn’t get down too far. I placed an ad on the internet and met Jacek, my next obsession, and created a whole installation about my obsession with him, The Night of the Hunter, and then made my first photographic construction, Every Inch of Jacek (above).

Who knows what Vick and Barb will find at the flea market.

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