Saturday was equally as beautiful as the past two days. You begin to believe it could be endless. I will try to believe that things can be endless. I fall so in love with it all.
She came from Kentucky, she said, raised by her grandparents on a farm, a ranch. She had been taken away from her parents. Her mother was just Kentucky run amuck. Her father was a Mexican boxer. Her mother was fifteen when she got pregnant, her father, the boxer, sixteen. Here grandparents were strict, she said. "Don't go out in the front yard. Put some clothes on." They were making up for the mother, perhaps, feeling they had not brought her up as strictly as they should. Or perhaps that was simply the way that they were.
She left school in the eleventh grade and got "Bobby" tattooed just above her mons. "The things you'll do at seventeen," she said laughing. They were living together, engaged. She'd known him since she was six. She was working two jobs trying to get by. Then something happened.
She missed her mother, she said, who had moved to the south, so she followed. When she came to the studio, it was with her new boyfriend who had been her best friend "forever." Now they were more. He brought her in a beat up old pick up truck. Another couple was behind them in a white '72 Charger. I couldn't believe my eyes.
She hadn't brought anything I wanted to shoot her in, so we began to pull together a wardrobe from things that I have. She was shy about changing, uncertain. A bit later. . . . She was a miracle there in front of the camera, the lights, thin and angular and poised. She had just turned twenty.
"Do you have any brothers or sisters," I asked?
"Eighteen."
"???? Do you know any of them?"
"No, not really."
"What are you going to do tonight," I asked when we were finished shooting.
"Oh, you know, light a bonfire, drink beer, lay out and look at the stars."
She's coming back again next week, she says. You can't imagine how I enjoy knowing her.
Of course, you may prefer The Boss's version (link).
"...the price that refusing to give up your illusions extracts from you..."
ReplyDeleteI still like the version you posted better than Springsteen's.
Michelle Pfeiffer
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5axlwCBXC8
ReplyDeleteA, It is Amy Mann and her husband Michael Penn who is Sean Penn's brother. It must be tough to always be bracketed by those two explanations.
ReplyDeleteR, A bit. Sometimes Bridgette Bardot. Sometimes Carmen Diaz. Sometimes. . . a figure from South of the Border in a movie from the fifties.
Q, ???
"Against all odds, we're the big door prize."
ReplyDelete