Vanity, Vanity

As we work to prepare my new website, Jeff says we need to set up a photo shoot. He is a photographer as well as a website designer, so it isn't surprising that he wants to enliven the site with photos—of me—in the kitchen. My kitchen.

 

Close-ups of my kitchen mean that I definitely have to make a few cosmetic changes. Some people might call this "cleaning." The extraneous items on my kitchen counters fill a whole box (a small box, I say in my defense). When that clutter has been swept aside, the counters look lean, mean, and ready for work.

 

It isn't just the counters. Before the deadline hour, I look dispassionately at my refrigerator. Oh, my. Outdated (by three or four years) photos of grandchildren partially overlap piles of their art work glommed to the fridge door by heavy-duty red magnets. I ruthlessly shove these all into boxes. Dozens of "aren't we clever" magnetized advertising cards have been slapped on to the fridge door over the years. I peel them off and discard them.

 

Then I come to the mood-revealer psychological chart (fifteen cartoon faces depicting emotional states). To use it, you choose the feeling of the moment and frame it with a movable little square frame, so that anyone who remembers to look at the thing can tell that you are ecstatic, angry, embarrassed, shy, etc. Both of our grandsons love this emotional tracking system, so it will go back on the fridge door after the shoot. Interesting that it is the male grandchildren, not the girls, who resort to this artificial means of expressing themselves. Now, don't read too much into this, Nana.

 

Counters are clean. Refrigerator door has been emptied and scrubbed (well, I had to scrub it, didn't I, once all those magnet-held items were removed?). The shiny white fridge door now reflects the light from the window opposite it, making the kitchen twice as bright.

 

What about me? My hair (oh, the hair is hopeless). My clothes: what will I wear? I'll wear jeans on the bottoms, and I choose three tops and three aprons and three pairs of earrings, plus a set of little hair-holding combs. All this is to change my appearance during the shoot so that the innocent viewer will think the photos have been snapped over a period of months. So clever.

 

And makeup. I'll put on a party face to fool the eye. Look, she has eyebrows! And look, cheekbones! And so forth through the cosmetic drawer of shame.

 

Jeff arrives and sets up the tripod. I pull out the pie crust dough I prepared the day before, so I can roll it out and whip up a batch of pinwheels as Jeff records my knuckles in close-up. At least we'll get to eat the pinwheels.

 

I peel a carrot. I chop an onion. I put a soup kettle on the unlit burner and pretend to stir the missing soup with a long-handled wooden spoon. That's an end to the cooking activity for the day.

 

Now Jeff wants shots of me in my environment. I stand on a stool before our 2000 cookbooks and pretend to reach for one, smiling mysteriously.

 

We move to the dining room. I am discovering that I, a classic no-pictures-please photophobe, quite like being the sole focus of Jeff's camera. Well, not the sole focus. Being a professional, he focuses on the lighting as much as on me. But I don't have to know that. I discover a new pleasure in smiling (Mona Lisa style) and looking straight at Jeff through the fat lens. I sit casually, arm draped over the back of a dining room chair, legs crossed, head leaning over onto hand (am I a contortionist? No, this looks very natural, Jeff says). I remember Blow Up and other movies about photographers and models. But Jeff doesn't ask me to move to music (if he did, perhaps I should choose Frauenliebe und Leben, given the domestic theme of the day). Does Jeff snap the shutter continually, is he urging me to twist and turn and smile and throw my head back and bend down so that my hair flops, a mane of Big Hair, over my face?

 

No to all of that. That would be fantasy, not reality.

 

But what fun to be the focus of the focus. When we're finished and I look at the shots, all that I notice is my head surrounded by an aureole of fluffy bright white hair. A trick of the light, I say to myself. Who IS this woman?

 

 

Copyright 2011 Ann Tudor

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com