American Photobooth

March 16, 2008

So, yes, the Photobooth reading on Thursday night was a smash. The Whistlestop was packed. Friends, family–my sister!, and students came out to see us. A real photobooth (from photoboof.com) was set up in a corner of the room and on a big screen in front of the audience hundreds of photobooth strips flashed by. The DJ set, by Deadbirds, was fun. My fellow readers were amazing, I was in such good company: Jess (whose piece about my mother’s cousin Rena blew me away–it was so smart and thoughtful), Sydney (oof, you are raunchy! My sister was in the audience! Come to think of it, so was Sydney’s mother; Manny Lupito 4-Ever, TLA), and of course, Ryan (really moving piece about the little boy, but hey, watch where you swing that microphone…). Afterward people danced, drank, took photos, talked.

To see the various photoboof pics from that night, click here.

It’s funny, the day after the reading, the NYTimes had an article about a new book on Photobooths, called American Photobooth.

Here’s a pic of me reading:

<–I bought a Mustard-yellow Penguin jacket (on sale) for the occasion!

I read three pieces. Two short pieces about these two photostrips:

This one I wrote from the perspective of the guy, talking to the woman in the picture.

Here’s an excerpt:

We met in community theater—

this was during your whole

Asian Donna Summer phase, remember?

And I swear, you started the trend of wearing legwarmers over your jeans—in Summer—in Santee.

God, the things we used to do together. The things you MADE me do.

Smoking all those clove cigarettes and drinking Bartles & James watermelon coolers until we puked.

Making me wear a paper bag over my head while you threw dried fruit at me.

The second photostrip is of some friends of mine, Dawn, and her partner, Adriana, and Dawn’s two kids, Noah and Lorelei.

For this piece I recited the theme song from The Brady Bunch:

Here’s the story of a lovely lady,
Who was bringing up three very lovely girls.
All of them had hair of gold, like their mother,
The youngest one in curls.

Here’s the story of a man named Brady,
who was busy with three boys of his own.
They were four men living all together,
yet they were all alone.

Til the one day when the lady met this fellow,
and they knew that it was much more than a hunch,
that’s this group would somehow form a family,
that’s the way they all became the Brady Bunch.

But I read it real slow, like a poem. The second verse is kind of dirty, I have to admit.

The third piece I read was about my mother, and went with this strip:

This is an actual strip of my mother, from about 1956. I found it in a scrapbook of hers that had several other photostrips of her and her friends (including one of someone named “cousin Rena” who you can see is on the poster from our reading).

Here’s an excerpt from the piece about my mother:

This photostrip of my mother was taken in 1956, when she was sixteen years old.

It might have been at Mission Beach. Or Catalina Island.

I like to imagine her and a friend, Helen, late one night as they snuck out of the house to meet boys. How they climbed out a window and clambered down a trellis to the street. Who hasn’t imagined their mother clambering down a trellis at one point in their life? They’re both in cashmere sweaters wearing Revlon’s Red Radiance lipstick and Helen—who’s the crazy one—has on a headband and cat glasses with the little rhinestones.

The fact is I don’t know where this was taken. I only know the date, scribbled on the back in pen in my mother’s handwriting.

I’m sure that Helen pushed my mother into the photobooth.

Because in the top photo my mother looks a little reluctant, and demure. Her eyebrows are drawn like Liz Taylor’, and her shoulder’s straight.

But her demeanor’s changed by the second photo. Her hair is a little messed up, as if she took that thirty seconds in between clicks and ran her fingers through it on purpose. Frenzied. A moment of daring and boldness that was so unlike her. She looks kind of like Lucille Ball.

In the third photo, though, she’s drawn back again. She’s seductive, or pensive, or maybe seductively pensive. I think it’s called a “come-hither” look? Her eyebrows are arched now, her mouth in a tight-lipped near smile.

What is she thinking?

It’s funny. Though I know, and recognize that yes, this is my mother in these photos—the brown eyes, the pert nose, the curly baby soft reddish-blonde hair—this is not how I ever really knew her. I mean, there’s the obvious reasons—that I wouldn’t be born for another thirteen years.

But it’s difficult to reconcile with myself that the woman in these images: posing playfully, messing up her hair, flirting with the camera, was the same woman who struggled for years, working various jobs: a dental hygienist, a secretary, a geriatric nurse, a microfilm technician at a bank.

The mother I remember, circa 1985, sits on our living room floor, on the moss-green carpet, picking fleas off of our dog.

The reading was such a hit, rumor has it we might do it again, in San Francisco.