Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Rose Annis

I’ve either been in New York or been using the Internet too long, because people I know keep popping up as minor supporting characters in stupid blogs I read. No one does anything interesting themselves, but they are important enough to be passingly mentioned in a Gawker story about Peaches Geldof’s sex orgy. Full disclosure: I don’t really know who Peaches Geldof is, but the guy who was quoted as knowing a dude, who knew a dude who was there… yeah, I know him. We were in class together—with a girl who now has her own show on MTV, as well as the shady son of an equally shady Chicago politician, a boy who managed to quote Ween in every single discussion we ever had. The course was called Jews in the Media, and that’s precisely what it was.

I only kept going because of a promise I made to Anna. As a catholic school girl from Georgia, she needed me there to translate words like shmata and Al Jolson and Dachau and rugelach. We would would eat 20-cent chicken wings and drink beer before class, and never show up earlier than ten minutes late. Once, I made a drunken presentation about Sammy Davis Jr. while my fingers were still smeared with hot sauce.

The kid who was peripherally involved in that Peach-sex thing sat there, listening and rolling a joint. When I finished, he raised his hand and asked for my phone number. In panic I looked toward our professor, who was from the Upper West side and frequently bemoaned being called a J.A.P. despite the fact that she had written her dissertation on Derrida and cyborgs. She only smiled encouragingly and twisted an engagement ring around her long, thin finger.

So we sat for weeks and talked about how Woody and Dylan were Jews and John Tuturro wasn’t, even though he often played one, and everyone in that room, the boy with his weed and future blog quote, the girl with her blackberry and circling camera crew, and me with my chicken, we all dreamed of the moment when our bids for attention would be added to the syllabus.

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by Rose Annis

You enter the grocery store; sliding doors part like a lazy red sea and immediately you know to avoid her. She has arranged herself casually amidst the produce section. On either side of her makeshift display, mangoes and avocados sit fat with rot. Gracelessly, you try to maneuver your cart around her cardboard sign, but a stack of canned goods block your way. She shoves a coupon into your hand.

“Five portraits for seven dollars, honey,” she brays at you.

You try to hand the coupon back. But it’s too late. To her, once that crummy piece of paper has stuck to your sweaty palm, the transaction is guaranteed.

“Take a picture with your family. Pay now, pick ‘em up later”

She gestures to the gallery behind her. Shots of terrified babies, each framed by airbrushed borders, gape at you. Unhappy-looking Latino families dressed in communion best stand rigid, captured forever in 8X10 glossy.

“No thank you,” you mutter, terrified that she might make you leaf through the binder she clutches to her sagging chest. You’re really not interested in a wallet sized option.

The key is to break eye contact. Once that connection is severed, her attention is turned towards other customers. Stealthily, you slip into the first empty aisle. Over the noise of unlubricated shopping-cart wheels and indefatigable salsa music, you can hear her proposition other shoppers. She is trying to make them feel at ease, relax them, seduce them into her Kodak coven.

You wander into the deli section. Wet slabs of spongy pork and gnarled chicken feet lay frosted in the coolers. Sausages, bursting from their casings, hang more for decoration than for sustenance. You can still hear the photo lady hollering. She has found a customer, or a friend, someone who is willing to listen to her talk. Although you’re not sure who or what she is responding to you hear her say, in a loud, righteous voice, “Work? Yeah. I work hard. One time I had a lacerated colon and I still showed up on time.”

You glance once more at that dangling string of fetid sausages and then longingly towards the exit. Slowly, you take your place in the check out line.

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