Imagine being immortalized, or at least captured, by total strangers twice in one day. This might be normal for some folks, but it is not for me.
It started at brunch on Saturday, at the place where we go every week. The owner's wife (I assume she is now. Going by the name changes on the ABC Manager board, they got married.) asked me if I had seen the picture down in the ladies' room and didn't it look like me.
I had to run downstairs and check. I had to make two trips because the room was occupied the first time I went down.
The restaurant had a pen and ink drawing made of the place and the one human figure that appears therein really does look like me from behind. The artist had drawn it from a photograph and he or she must have taken the picture early one Saturday afternoon, inadvertently capturing me as the man and I were leaving. If I had known I was going to be in a piece of Art, I would have tucked in my shirt. Even so, despite the picture being a visual record of my slob-hood, it looks nice, begging the question as to why it's down in the ladies' room. And the situation was comprehensible, unlike what happened later.
That night, the man and I were driving up the hill on Marshall, coming back home from dinner, the vehicle ahead of us pulled off to the side at a four-way stop and the driver snapped a picture of the back of the car. Huh? We had been nearly a block behind them and hadn't been tailgating or otherwise driving with aggression, so they wouldn't have had any desire to get our license number. And the back of a Subaru at night is not exactly photogenic, or even interesting. When we stopped at the light at 25th, they caught up and pulled up beside us. The driver rolled down his window, whipped out the camera, and took a picture of us, still in full "huh?" mode. Now that I think of it, I'd kind of like to see that picture—we must look incredibly dorky, with mouths open, eyes half squinting, and heads tilted to the side.
Now I'm just wondering what that was all about. Is the new urban pastime drive-by photography?
393 words | February 8, 2004 08:13 PM | Real true story