Facebook memory: photo shoot with Richard Salzman, take one and a half

Seeking chronological order, I posted a version of this story but this was written in 2017.

I was doing a photo shoot, a double-truck fashion spread, certainly one of my weirdest assignments ever for The Paper, (fashion was not my thing at all), and I needed one more image—my models were flighty young creatures from my poetry class at El Molino High School, were gone for the evening, and I was the last one standing in the field at deadline. Make that dreadline.

So I went to see my neighbor Richard Salzman and he said Just use yourself. I set up the lighting on a music stand, and the camera on a tripod, set the focal plane, shutter and aperture, and hoped for the best. (No light meter, just my jaundiced eye.) It's sort of an assisted selfie. Of course, you can't go wrong with a Hasselblad. Incredible glass. Large format negatives were more forgiving, you could practically use then as contact prints, as is.

The Paper (North Bay Bohemian) editor Nick Valentine would loan his camera to me from time to time. The camera was worth the price of a small country. I quaked whenever I used it. I never expected Nick to use the photo for The Paper, but he did. That's Richard Salzman tickling the ivories, in Forestville. Late 80s?

Now, our cabins were the size of a minute. You had to go outside in order to change your mind. Richard moving his piano into that cabin was a major feat of ingenuity. So we were also fighting physics too, to get the distance, and most of my body into the frame. I had to shoot it from the corner of the bed.

You know, it's funny, but I had no real sense of self, or how I looked to others—my inner dialogue was always nattering on, telling me that I was homely as a mud fence. My tall, leggy aunts and mother were the gorgeous creatures. My Aunt Jane was the Gallo Girl on the back of the Sunday Funnies, and Time Magazine. I was indoctrinated at an early age not to be vain, or focus on my looks, etc. And the girls in school were seriously cruel, as a rule of thumb, always making fun of me, because I was from the San Geronimo Valley, and wore hand-me-downs, etc. So glad when the hippie movement rolled in, because it no longer mattered what we wore. Liberating.

I was not a fan of the mirror either. I once made the mistake of looking at myself at Judy Soga's house—after someone had slipped me some acid Koolaid earlier that afternoon at the Kent Lake spillway, and let’s just say it was a long, rough ride. Took me years to get over that trip. The Pinnochio nose slidehsow didn't help. I drank a whole lot of it, as it was a hot day at the spillway.. I was stratospheric for a solid week. My ride was a darker turn of the soul as well. Why I am glad the heaviest stuff I ever tried was peyote. Hitching out the The Valley after peyote tea, I swear I saw the ghosts of Miwoks by the golf course.

Speaking of print ads, Bill Deutra, the Marlboro Man, lived right across from me, lovely man, full of stories, the KS ravaging his handsome face. He'd take me out tea dancing in Guerneville. Told me about JEdgar's propensity for cross-dressing. I know the feeling. I felt like I was (reverse) cross-dressing in this photo. Out of character, out of soul depth, charging right ahead into the abyss. I was madly in love with poetry itself, the rest was ephemera.

From a Facebook post. Worth revisiting it. I pulled my comments and reposted most of them here. I revisited it again, and wrote yet another version of it. Which one to keep? See Jan 1, 1981 for first iteration, posted under the photo creation date, but the comments were from 2017. Dilemma, where/how to post, chronologically speaking. For the long and winding, if not flat-out convoluted, musical version, see:

Photo shoot with Richard Salzman, 1981, long, musical version, Take two