Free Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty by Diane Keaton Page B

life.
    Josie, my Jaws, had been reawakened in a photograph taken by a man I didn’t know. The subject was a dog I’d never seen. Keith Carter wrote this: “For me, a portrait is something that has a certain weight, a certain seriousness to it.… These days, I treat everything as a portrait, whether it’s a safety pin hanging from a string in a woman’s bedroom, or a man witching for water in a field. They’re the same. They are all equal, I try to give them the same weight.”
WENDY, THE MADAME ALEXANDER DOLL
    One day Mom drove me to my friend Mary Lou’s house. It was on the other side of the 110 freeway. That meant one thing: her house would be shabby and small. When our station wagon pulled up I saw I wasn’t wrong, and the inside was no better. Off the narrow hallway were four doors. Behind door number 3 was Mary Lou’s bedroom. When she opened it, I was struck dumb. There on a bookshelf as big as the wall stood a museum-sized collection of Madame Alexander dolls. Nine-year-old-me wasn’t prepared for a feeling I’d never had before. I’ll say this: it wasn’t good. Why did Mary Lou’s parents, who lived on the other side of the 110, have enough money to buy her hundreds of the most collectible doll ever? Why hadn’t Mom and Dad given me the Scarlett O’Hara doll for Christmas, or at least one of the famous Dionne quintuplet baby dolls from 1936, and the Queen Elizabeth the Second doll, too? But the worst possible shock, the one I wasn’t able to handle with even a modicum of grace, was Mary Lou’s brand-new eight-inch Wendy, the bridesmaid doll, in a pink ruffled gown, with a perfect straw hat balanced on top of her curly blond hair.
    One week later, I was called into my parents’ bedroom. Mary Lou’s mother, Nancy, had phoned our house on the party line, wanting to know if I’d unintentionally taken theMadame Alexander Wendy doll. That’s when I understood that beauty could be evil. It could make a perfectly good girl like me turn into the devil. So, what is beauty? When I was nine, it belonged to someone else, and I made it MINE, consequences or not.
THE LEGACY OF BILL WOODS, JR.; OR, THE FAMILY OF MAN
    Bill Woods, Jr., was a professional photographer who documented life in Fort Worth for several decades after World War II. His studio on Hawkins Street was a hub of activity. He drove a yellow VW Bug. He wore bow ties. He took a picture of an adolescent girl in a bathing suit with a football-sized tumor protruding from her thigh. He took a picture of Eleanor Roosevelt shaking hands with a man in front of a curtain. He took a picture of a man holding a rifle standing next to a dead bear hanging by its feet. He took a picture of two nuns seated in a bare room with a small TV in the corner and a black man in a janitor’s uniform cleaning a white porcelain bowl. I bought every one of the twenty thousand photographs Bill Woods, Jr., took with his large-format camera.
    Bill Woods’s photographs were commissioned by a variety of local patrons, who posed in front of a series of backdrops culled from real life. But reality vanished with the click of Mr. Woods’s camera. Diane Arbus said, “For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. Andmore complicated.” That was the result, if not the intention, of Bill Woods’s life work. His subjects were, as Diane Arbus said, more complicated than the story each photograph was trying to tell.
    Bill Woods was no Diane Arbus. Bill Woods got the job done. He recorded life in Fort Worth. He gave his clients validation, just not the way they expected. Bill Woods’s work is a reminder that none of us are that much different from the folks of Fort Worth. We all long to feel confident, look great, and do well. We all want to be remembered. Sometimes we’re lost. Sometimes we’re found. But one thing’s for sure: no matter how much control we have over our appearance, we’re all awkward, laughable, ugly, and beautiful at the same