Last Sunday night I had the honor of shooting a series of promo shots for a show being directed by my dear friend and favorite bartender, Mr. Wade Lucas.

I would like to say that I was granted this honor because of my finely honed skills as an artist and a photographer but that would be a lie. I was granted this opportunity because I’m the only photographer Wade knows who is so lacking in survival instincts that she would answer “Sure!” to the question, “Wanna come take photos in a motel room? In Del Paso Heights? After dark?”

Which is how I found myself looking a little lost on Del Paso Boulevard last Sunday evening with thousands of dollars worth of equipment around my neck and too much time on my hands. (I was forty-five minutes early because I’ve never gotten the hang of the whole “clock” thing. Still, I was kid-free and husband-free and since my life mostly centers around wiping butts and bargaining with the Devil to help me un-learn the lyrics to the Dora The Explorer theme song I kind of thought the drunks and the panhandlers made for a nice change of pace; which is why I took out my camera and started taking photos.

I hadn’t been shooting for five minutes before some very tall, hippie-looking dude sidled up next to me on the sidewalk.

“Whatcha doing?”

“Fishing.” I tried to blow him off, figuring he was just another pothead trying to shake change out of me for a loose joint. He continued to stand next to me. I finished what I was doing and moved a couple feet down the walk. Aim, focus, click, whir.

“You a photographer or something like that?”

“Something like that.”

Focus, click. Focus, click.

“This is my place.”

“Your place what?”

“My restaurant.” He gestured toward the building I was busy photographing.

“Your restaurant.”

“My restaurant.”

Right. I thought. Aim, focus, click, whir.

“You wanna come inside?” Hippie-looking dude waved keys in front of my eyes. A very legitimate looking set of keys. I was intrigued. Maybe hippie-dude really did have a restaurant. He was kind of cute.

“This place? Right here?” I asked, confused. I looked in the window. It was dark inside.

“Yeah. Come on in. You can take pictures if you want. I’d like that.”

Now, there are a multitude of intelligent responses one’s brain might produce when faced with a request by a rather large and somewhat sketchy-looking stranger upon being invited into a dark storefront in a not-so-great part of town.

This! your brain might suggest, …is a perfectly good way to land yourself in a shallow grave. Or cut into bits in a dumpster. Or incorporated into someone’s as-of-yet-unpoured new concrete floor.

But! As I have mentioned before, my life centers around such mundanities as the PTA and bitching about the water bill and really? When the highlight of your week involves brake-checking people in the carpool lane at you kid’s school? All the sudden entering a dark storefront with a perfect stranger promising a photo op starts looking less like A Catastrophically Bad Idea and more like Something To Break Up The Monotony.

“Sure!” I said.

I followed hippie-dude inside. Did I mention he was kind of cute? In that Ted Bundy way?

Once inside hippie-dude was as good as his word; he walked me around his restaurant (”Grand opening’s on Cinco de Mayo” he mentioned as he gestured to the Latin-inspired treats in the cooler) while telling me about his vision: a desire to use his restaurant as a way to educate the public about nutrition while simultaneously combining his culinary skills (which I am now qualified to attest, are quite substantial) and art. There is a mural-in-progress that an artist friend of his had been working on. Tables were set out. A product line of his own creation graced the cold cases in front. The place was painted in various hues of orange which immediately endeared it to me. The place was - and will be in the future - totally kick-ass.

So I took photos and we exchanged business cards and I promised to write and blah, blah, blah… and in the end there was no murder, no strangulation, no luring of certain overly-trusting females into walk-in coolers or manufacture of snuff videos.

There was food though.

“Here, since you’re taking photos,” hippie-dude said as he extended a tray filled with handmade truffles. “I’ll hook you up with some stuff I made today. There’s uh, letsee… banana, coconut, and just plain chocolate…”

Since I’ve already told you that I wandered Del Paso Heights with my camera and lenses and then subsequently followed a stranger into a darkened building I don’t really need to tell you that I accepted the offer of food, do I? Because I did. And it was delicious. And not at all laced with GHB.

Still, as I walked away from the as-yet-unopened storefront I had to work pretty hard to dismiss the tableau in my mind of my father standing over my grave, shaking his fist and yelling I TOLD YOU NEVER TO TAKE CANDY FROM STRANGERS!

P.S. - The photo shoot went well too! Gorgeous actors, fabulous attitudes! Great shots…

Here is the text of an e-mail I received from one of our city council members regarding the death of a soldier from Elk Grove. I was asked to disseminate as widely as possible:

Dear Fellow Elk Grove Citizen:

As all of you know, we lost one of our own with the death of Sgt. Bryan Hall who was killed in Iraq.  CCSD Fire Chief Steve Foster is coordinating a tribute as Sgt. Hall comes home and has asked that we help him get the message out into the community.

The CCSD Fire Department will transport Sgt. Hall on a fire engine from executive airport on Sunday morning. Chief Foster is asking that, we as fellow citizens, line Elk Grove Blvd. to pay tribute to Sgt. Hall. The procession will on the Elk Grove Blvd. near the fire station by 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, April 19th with a 50 vehicle procession. Chief Foster will be also be coordinating the flags that morning.

Please forward this email on to everyone on your email list and let’s do what we do best in Elk Grove, come together to honor one of our own.

Sincerely,
Connie Conley

If you are in Elk Grove or the greater Sacramento area, please join us tomorrow morning at 11:30 on EGB near Elk Grove-Florin Road for the procession to the Elk Grove Mortuary. This family has expressed an interest in having their son’s sacrifice acknowledged publicly and would be comforted by the hero’s welcome that both they and SSG Hall deserve.

I realize that I’ve been neglecting my blog lately and I kinda feel bad about it. Kinda. But since my blog is a mere blip on the ginormous list that I like to call Things Steph Neglects Regularly (Not Including Her Children Because Admitting That Would Result In Yet Another Visit From Mr. Caseworker From Child Protective Services) I’m usually able to sleep pretty well at night.

As always, I have a pretty good list of reasons I haven’t been posting as much as I’d like and at the very tip-top of that list is “Sculpting a replica of a deceased human’s head for my restorative art class”. And if you know me in real life then you can probably understand why attempting to sculpt a human head? Out of wax? Might take so much of my time.

This is partly because this is my first attempt at sculpting anything ever and partly because I am less artistically inclined than the people responsible for creating the “art” that hangs in places like dental offices and having less talent than someone who makes a few pastel-colored swipes on an otherwise bland canvas is really saying something.

As if my own insecurities about my profound lack of ability weren’t enough, I have friends who feel the urge to nudge me over the proverbial edge. For instance, a girlfriend stopped by the other day to pick up a lens she had left in my camerabag. On her way out she gazed at the progress I had made and declared, “It looks good.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Yeah. It’s your friend’s head your creating right?”

“Yeah.”

“The black girl?”

“My subject’s Filipino.”

“Oh.”

Sound of running. Front door slam. Tires squealing.

I can’t wait for this semester to be over.

This morning my children bounced out of bed with so much energy there should have been an eight ball of coke behind it. Since I have been trapped in this house with these kids for a spring break that has dragged on for way too long already I glared at my darlings wearily and figured Screw it, we’re going out in public anyway.

Then we went to the state capitol.

I’m sorry if you were trying to have a conversation Mr. Yelling Into His Cell Phone. Apparently my son disrupted your ranting as he ran past you on his way through the ironically named “peace” garden.

Hello homeless man! Were you sleeping on that there bench? No longer! Meet my daughter, the one who has never met a stranger, as she awakens you with a hearty “HI! MY NAME’S SOPHIA! WHAT’S YOURS?!?! ARE YOU CAMPING MISTER?”

Hello Mr. State Trooper! I bet you were hoping that today might be the day the capitol building finally gets taken over by terrorists or that, at the bare minimum, someone gets mouthy enough for you to remind everyone that you do, in fact, carry a sidearm. You live for that stuff don’t you? Too bad! You get the Matulich Clan instead and while my children won’t do anything that would come close to justifying your sixteen hours of annual pepper spray training they will most certainly make you wish that I’d updated my birth control. It’s ok, admit it. I don’t look like I’m perpetually on the verge of tears for nothing.

…and that’s how we spent most of this morning. I tried to take photos on the grounds of the state capitol while my children tripped over homeless people and ran screaming into traffic. Once we got inside I tried my best to pawn them off on a few of the guided tour groups but the staff proved a little too adept at finding me - which made me realize that what this world needs most are incompetent docents.

Anyway. Here are the results of our little trek. And now I’m off to have a drink, or ten.

Rose sculpture at the capitol “peace” garden that was anything but so long as we were there.

Monument to Father Junipero Serra.

Fountain with palms.

Capitol dome.

State assembly floor.

As if there’s a difference.

Stairs.

State senate gallery.

To myself, that is.

#1 - This morning, printed on a side of a cereal box:

What are GDA’s?

My answer, made for my own benefit (and possibly my dog’s, if he counts, which really? He probably doesn’t since dogs have neither the ability to roll their eyes or tell their owners that they’re acting very scary? So please stop cracking yourself up?):

“G-Damn aardvarks!”

#2 - Upon setting my coffee on a desk filled with bills, cancelled checks, years worth of tax returns and basically every document that we would need to prove our laughable net worth:

“Awesome! Let’s spill some coffee ’round here! Woo hoo!”

#3 - To my dog, whose inability to register concern for my deteriorating mental health I’ve taken as permission to talk - alone - as much as I wish, resulting in my reading passages from Alan Greenspan’s book The Age of Turbulence. I don’t think he understood very much of it which, I suppose, puts him in league with about 98% of the American public.

…and now I shall turn off the computer and ponder what comes first: loneliness or depression?

As part of my education in the fabulous field that is funeral service education I am enrolled in a course titled “Restorative Arts”. As the name suggests, the course involves our ever-patient professor attempting to impart his artistic ability upon students like myself without throwing up his hands or coming at us with knives.  

We have been told that it is the sincere hope of our department’s instructional staff that - upon completion of our restorative arts coursework- we students will be capable of repairing the remains of deceased individuals in such a way that would make them acceptable for viewing… axes to the face, head-on collisions and self-inflicted shotgun wounds to the head be damned.

We’ve been given tools: 

…and wax: 

…and have also been instructed to make our very own human heads. To wit:

This is the start to my human head. I am modeling it after my friend Cindy, a delightful gal who is a mother, research scientist, medical doctor, triathlete, hates big meanies, loves her mother, enjoys long walks on the beach and prefers puppies over kittens. Cindy’s being a doctor meant she was delighted to have her likeness rendered in wax. This is, of course, is a welcome reprieve from several of my other friends who regularly put their hands over my mouth and say things like, OH NO NO NO… STOP RIGHT THERE whenever the subject of my current romp through education comes up.

At any rate, if you look at the photo above you might be tempted to think that it’s an ok start for a freshman attempt at molding a human face so long as the face in the photo above belonged to someone who wore their sweater tied around their neck, considered polka a legitimate form of music and had all the rhythm of a seizing epileptic. Unfortunately for me however, Cindy’s not white and my project is hopelessly hee-haw and all this means that I get to experience the joy that is scrapping the whole thing and starting from scratch which makes me use long run-on sentences about how I would really, really like to make some statement about suffering for my art but I think you all know me enough by now to realize that I don’t suffer for my art so much as get cranky when my homework cuts into the all-important Cocktail Hour.

Hello E-Bay.

We’ve been acquainted with one another for quite some time and even though nobody had ever gone to the trouble of formally introducing us, I felt like you kind of knew me. I mean, I liked the fact that I could visit you at any time - day or night - and you would be there for me.

When I wanted a place where I can buy my favorite running shoes for less than a gazillion dollars, you came through. When I needed a wetsuit that would keep me snuggly warm in the middle of kelp bed you totally delivered. When I was asked to shoot photos of jewelry and needed a macro lens you were all over it. In fact, so gratified was I by your ability to furnish me with running, photographic and swimming stuff that I developed a bit of a crush on you. I felt like we understood each other. You really “got” it when it came to my needs.

Therefore E-Bay, perhaps you can imagine my disappointment when I received an e-mail from you today that contained enticing images of products that not only do I have no interest in owning, but have an irrational aversion to.

Look at that list above. Running. Photography. Swimming. Is there anything in that list that suggests I’m interested in becoming some pain in the ass yuppie princess? Because that’s the impression I was left with when I received an e-mail in which you tried to draw my attention to the fact that you can sell me Kate Spade, Manolo Blahnik, diamond tennis bracelets, Steve Madden and cosmetics of a variety that I had no clue existed until I opened your e-mail.

I didn’t wear make-up at my own wedding. Save a few tubes of lipstick I don’t even own any. In fact, I think the closest I’ve come to wearing make-up was sometime during the Reagan administration when I snuck into my mom’s stash and fed her foundation to the family dog.

So why are you trying to sell me something I would never use? Why - in a million years - would you throw the term “Kate Spade” in my direction and expect a Pavlovian response from me - a woman who prefers a leap into the ocean over buying a purse that would do nothing but collect dust in her closet?

Also, what’s this business about the stiletto heels? I’m sorry E-Bay, but have you forgotten? I’m six feet tall. I already frighten most men and I certainly don’t need six inch heels to push their terror level to “orange”.

Since I’ve never been one to bitch without suggesting a solution, here’s mine: fire everyone. Hire people who know what they’re doing. Given the current economic climate and the fact that you’re in Silicon Valley it should be too hard. Just take 101 North to Cisco’s headquarters and work your way west toward Intel until you have a full staff of techie nerds. Then instruct them to stop sending me e-mails filled with crap I’ll never buy.

Really, it’s that easy.

I have a husband, two kids, a quasi-SUV and house in the burbs. It had occurred to me that the only thing standing between me and utter Stepford wife-ism was a lack of “dog”. As in a-house-in-the-burbs-two-kids-and-a-dog.

Meet Jack.

Jack is a german shorthair pointer we picked up from a gsp rescue near Marysville. Jack is a somewhat odd animal. So far as we can tell he doesn’t bark, whine, whimper or growl. He does make an odd groaning noise when you rub his ears, a sound which usually precedes a graceless flop into your lap. He is socially inept. He loves people in general and kids in particular. He has a habit of walking right into the middle of whatever you are doing. He can, at times, behave like an over-caffeinated monkey. I am totally in love with him.

I wanted very badly to take photos of Jack but it turns out that Jack is terrified of my camera. My husband suggested that this might indicate that the dog had been beaten which, I am sure you will agree, is totally absurd. After all, I can’t think of a single person who would go about beating dogs with a $1,200 camera, can you? Well, maybe Warren Buffet or Bill Gates could afford to go about beating animals with pricey electronics, but neither men seem the type to do so.

Of course, shortly after Jack’s retreat in the face of my camera he cowered when I picked up the remote, my laptop, the playstation controllers and a clock radio.

“See?” I told my husband, “He hasn’t been beaten. He’s just a total luddite.”

Anyway, so what I wanted to say is this: I know I have a few runners that read because you e-mail me all the time and flatter me by asking my opinion about running-related things as if I actually know something about the sport. (I mean, wouldn’t you be surprised if at some point you showed up in Northern California and discovered first-hand that I was just another yahoo in Asics who executed what can only be described as a controlled fall for twelve miles?) But I will tell you this: if you are looking for a good running partner, get a gsp. These dogs can go for days. And when they aren’t going? They’re total couch potatoes. And they don’t shed. And, apparently the don’t bark either. And they’re pretty darned smart. And they can walk on water. And tutor you in math.

Being in mortuary school means that you are frequently confronted with situations that make your family and friends put their head in their hands and mutter things like, ”Why can’t you just be normal and become an admin assistant? Or be like that bear guy who made the movie about grizzlies?”

Recently, my restorative arts class presented a problem unique to the funeral service major. I needed someone to pretend they were dead. Then, while they were laying around all un-lifelike I needed to take a bunch of photos of them. Then I needed to use said photos to reconstruct their lifeless likeness in wax, all the while convincing them that There Was Nothing Creepy At All About Any Of It.

Identifying an available pool of candidates has been difficult at best. I was lukewarm on picking a celebrity for reasons unclear to even myself. My brother the archaeologist seemed like a natural choice - as his occupation involves digging up dead people and has long since overcome the “ick” factor associated with death. But he lives too far away to make taking photos of him practical. And the though of recreating his viking beard gives me a headache. Also, he’s a goofy goober.

My sisters both looked at me and backed away slowly after the request had been made.

My husband crossed himself and then did some weird thing with his hands to ward off the evil eye.

The neighbors ran into their house, chased me off with a broom and installed new locks on their doors before arming themselves with pitchforks and organizing a torch light parade to my door.

Ok, not really.

Still, picking someone who would be comfortable going along with this project was pretty difficult. Then I remember my friend Cindy. Cindy, the doctor. Cindy, who has a fascination with the coroner’s office. Cindy who has spent a ton of time around cadavers and - in her work with AIDS patients - people on the verge of cadaverhood.

So I asked Cindy if she’d mind being used for my project and she agreed a little too enthusiastically. Now it was my turn to be weirded out.

At any rate, a couple of my classmates and I had the idea that we should document our progress in photos. Therefore, if you’ve ever been interested in how a group of people whose modeling skills barely qualify them to make ashtrays develop the skills necessary to rebuild a human head, stay tuned.

There are times - usually twelve to eighteen hours out of the day - when I just want the hell out of California. Because - lack of snow and gorgeous weather notwithstanding - living here means spending an inordinate amount of time around people who are so busy clapping themselves on the back for being open-minded that they have failed to recognize Gavin Newsom for the self-aggrandizing douche bag that he is. Or who rail against wealthy people and large corporations even as they simultaneously covet the goods proffered by both.

Then there are times when the benefits of living here come very, very, very close to eclipsing the myopic din of blood oaths against capitalism. 

Yes, I’m talking about the benefits of living in wine country, where you can almost get drunk enough to make hippies tolerable. Yes, I have photos. Yes, I am hard up for material for a post. 

Wall with grapevines trailing up it.

Prickly pear and nopales cactus.

Winery door. 

Mission San Francisco Solano.

Holy water font at Mission San Francisco Solano.

Limantour beach.

Running on the beach.