My friend Alfonso down in Dallas has put up some of his magic words and images on this digital wonderland. If you read his post you will learn that he grew up in a southern California resort where certain people frequented. He has never bragged about his meeting great and/or famous people during his lifetime. He doesn't need to. He is far too concerned with the authentic rather than the glitzy. This is one of his posts that sends me off on a nostalgic tangent. He has a penchant for that. Today we writes about perception and the camera. My father too was a photographer and home movie buff. He had higher artistic aspirations, but he was not bitter about not having attained them. He worked for two photographic studios and then for the Naval Underwater Sound Lab in Groton, CT. There he took pictures of old women breaking bottles of Champagne on the bows of nuclear submarines. After he died in 1979, I had a hell of a time getting his reels of 16mm film and my family photo albums back from his second wife. He married out of loneliness and loss rather than any love or affection. Another story that I might or not tell. The precious reels of film were stored in unkind places so much splicing was done before they were transferred to VHS tape. The reels contained footage of a very young Marco, an early 1950's Christmas, several weddings of my aunts and uncles, an aunt's high school graduation, a VJ Day parade and my parents' vacation to Rochester, NY, Niagara Falls (when The Maid of the Mist still went behind the falls). The first time that I watched the tape I noticed a highway sign at the start of the mash up of film reels. The VHS transfer was done randomly. I hit rewind to make sure of what I saw. The name on the highway sign read "Route 9W Delmar, NY" which is where we now live. A sign?
"If you took all the girls I knew when I was single
Brought 'em all together for one night
I know they'd never match my sweet imagination
Everything looks worse in black and white"