RE: [Leica] Am I really doing this

["bdcolen" <bdcolen@earthlink.net>]

It's now 12:45 a.m. Monday and I just got to my hotel about a half hour
ago, having left Columbia, SC, at about 10:30 Sunday a.m....13.5 hours
in a van with two other adults, an 8-year-old, five-year-old, and
two-year-old.

Chubby showed up, and, as I think I've already reported, wasn't. Chubby.

The ride down was horrendous, and included a one hour wait for a family
member, at 4:30 a.m., for an hour in a McDonald's parking lot in
suburban Washington.

The reunion was fascinating, but something of a bust photographically,
as the promised Saturday afternoon at the state park didn't come off due
to severe rain storms - so all the eating, etc., took place in the area
around the Holiday Inn's indoor pool...really crappy lighting, no
softball, no games and what not for the kids, no playing cards on picnic
tables under the trees.....

Still got some interesting stuff - how interesting I'll know in a few
days when I see the film....

But, as with the best outings, there was a real lesson learned:
reporting and shooting simply don't go together. I can do both well, but
not at the same time. While I am able to multitask when it comes to
simple tasks, I cannot multitask creatively. It is certainly possible to
do interviewing, etc., and shooting - when there are days, weeks, or
months to do both, and they can be done at different times. But worrying
about both at the same time distracts from both.

Best story of the weekend, which will only with great difficulty and
disguise make it's way into the final published report:

So one of the reunion organizers, who is 30, on the way down tells me
her story...

She was born when her mother - unmarried - was 18. Two years later her
mother got jailed for nine years on an assault charge. After her mother
got sent off, her father and several friends pulled a bank job and got
$90G. Her father then took her to her maternal grandmother, who lived in
Queens, gave the grandmother a big chunk of the money, and said 'take my
daughter and go back to Columbia and buy a house somewhere and raise
her. And the grandmother did just that.

Well, along the way, the grandmother lost the house, and the mother, who
was out of jail and had also returned to Columbia, where she was a
falling down drunk and street walker, came back to reclaim her daughter.
Daughter then, at 16, dropped out of high school and headed for NY to
try to find her father. Through friends of her mother she found him, was
reunited, only to then learn that her father was dying of AIDS and his
new wife didn't want his daughter in the picture taking away from the
time he had left.

Now said daughter got her high school diploma, is married to a Greek
American, has three wonderful little daughters, and is living a
stunningly middle class life in rural PA on the Jersey border....

Flash forward to the reunion dinner....and who should appear....Devil
with a red dress on...drunk...shaking her booty at everyone including
children....Yes....The mother....looking, in her red dress, like a dime
store version of that painting - was it Hopper? Or was it Sloane? - of a
woman in a red dress walking in Harlem?

And wait until you see the shot of daughter verbally tearing into Mom
for man handling one of the kids.....;-)


Meanwhile, rather than prattle on - who me?:-) - I will post the story I
am supposed to write for Newsday when it's finished...

Goodnight....

Oh - the family was wonderful.

B. D.

- -----Original Message-----
From: owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
[mailto:owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us] On Behalf Of Daniel
Ridings
Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 11:29 PM
To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
Subject: Re: [Leica] Am I really doing this

> PS: Didn't you forget a laptop to offload the digital stuff?
Batteries,
> white crosses ...

Just to be safe ... "white crosses" was a tasteless reference to the
small
tablets truckers used to take to stay awake and nothing else. I've been
gone a long time, ... it might be up there in the same league as nookie
when it comes to dated vocabulary.
D


- --
To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html

- --
To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html