I want to be this woman
Dianne Sylvan of Dancing Down the Moon relates a story about standing in line at a coffeeshop behind a pretentiously dressed, thin, blond woman who is having a hard time making up her mind what to order.
The woman is now weighing the pros and cons of having skim milk versus two percent milk in her latte, and she says, “God, I don’t know, I just feel so, like, fat today. I feel like such a big fat cow.”
Then she turns to me, and she says, GET THIS, “How do you stand it every day?”
I blink.
The adorable pierced-and-tattooed boy en flambe blinks.
Several heads in the cafe pop up because nobody can believe this woman actually said this to a total stranger. I feel as if the sitcom camera is pulling in tight for a closeup on my reaction.
But the gods of snark are smiling upon me today. I reply, straightfaced, “You know, it’s normally not too bad, but today I’m having one of those days where I feel like a shallow dumb bitch. How do you stand it every day?”
She’s my hero.
February 29th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Nice.
March 2nd, 2008 at 10:23 am
I laughed out loud when I read that but I’m
crippled by empathy here. It would be a lot funnier in a sitcom.
This week I did a portrait of a woman in her late fifties. She was very slender, had bleached blonde hair, too much makeup to hide her age but not very successfully, and immaculate dressy clothes. She said it was “physically painful” to have her picture taken.
We walked to a nearby spot where there was a neutral background and a natural play of light considerably superior to most studios. I traded a couple jokes with her, tried to make the whole thing low key, talked about non-photographic subjects, tried to radiate relaxitude so she would relax too. And got a pretty nice picture, but it was hard work. I wound up deleting most of the pictures.
How did she get the way she is? What did somebody say to her, probably many times during her childhood in the 1950’s, to cause her so much pain so many years later? That woman in the coffee shop certainly lacked empathy but people in pain often do. How is it she “felt like a fat cow”…