The Thirty Something Snap

Chapter Ten - The Photo Shoot

Peter, Ellen, Sylvia, Penny, and I all loaded into the elevator at 250 Hudson Street. As the door to the elevator closed and we began to ascend to our offices Penny and I made eye contact with each other and I got the sense that she was feeling a level of stage fright. I was feeling it too. Of course there was no reason for us to feel any stage fright because from this point on we were simply orchestrating the campaign. “Peter was the one who should be feeling stage fright,” I thought.

I looked over at Peter and I couldn’t tell if he was nervous or not. So I asked, “You nervous, Peter?”

Peter shrugged his shoulders, “About what?” he answered.

“Oh, nothing makes Peter nervous,” Ellen said. “I’m more nervous than he is.”

I thought about how nervous Peter was Saturday morning on the ride from the hospital when he kept repeating for me to not tell Ellen he had been to a nudist resort.

Sylvia was holding on to her casserole dish. It was covered with aluminum foil and a dish towel. Sylvia added to the conversation saying, “I’d be real nervous, but I think Peter will do fine. He’s in good shape.”

Ellen responded, “When the photos are done I wonder if I’ll be able to get some eight-by-ten glossies. I want to send one to my cousin, Elma,   in Poughkeepsie, and I’m sure the kids will want one to show to their friends.”

I looked at Peter. Now he looked nervous.

The door to the elevator opened and I led the way with Penny toward the Facilitation Room. As we drew nearer to the room it was clear that a lot of activity was going on. Russell walked up beside me and said, “Wait until you see the Facilitation Room.”

There were a dozen, or so, college-age men and women busily working to put together an impromptu installation art exhibit under the direction of Tomoko Takahashi. The Facilitation Room was filled with various piles of objects and photographs and vegetables. Each pile seemed to have a theme but it was hard to look at the piles and not think that they simply resembled the results of someone preparing piles of trash for the morning trash pick-up.

Russell smiled as Penny and I looked into the unusually active room and said, “Isn’t this great?”

I looked at Russell and asked, “You actually get this? I don’t get it at all.”

Russell then said, “You’ll get it once it’s explained.” Russell then called out to an older gentleman taking photographs of the progressive assembly of the works of art and said, “Dennis, let me introduce you to my colleagues.”

Dennis was somewhat rotund, probably in his late fifties or early sixties, his hair was long but thinning and nearly all gray and pulled in a pony tail. He was wearing a Mets baseball cap on backwards.

Dennis stopped taking photographs and walked over to the six of us standing in the doorway. I reached out to shake Dennis’ hand and thanked him for coming on such short notice. Penny did the same.

“Tell them what you told me about the art,” Russell said to Dennis.

Dennis responded, “Well, as I was telling Russell, the art is your reaction and not the item on display.”

We were suddenly getting a lecture on what art is but Penny and I listened politely as Dennis continued, “Art is a human thing. It’s an inner thing. And it’s a personal thing. There is nothing necessarily intrinsically interesting about an inanimate object whether it’s a painting or a statue or a pile of rubbish. What makes art interesting is our reaction to it.”

Dennis went on, “Once we’ve been jaded by an art style by overexposure to it we begin to look for something new and something that will, once again, be interesting to us. Think about nude statues. Nobody seems to mind them. But place a living breathing nude model on a pedestal in Central Park and everyone will have a reaction to it.”