Picture This

I wonder how many people out there have a picture of me on a wall. Or on the fridge. Or tucked away in a scrapbook. Or in their "TO BURN" bile. 10? 5? 0? And who knows WHERE these people are, right? Maybe there's a photo of me in Idaho. Or Canada. Kinda creepy, right? And that's just people who actually KNOW me, much less random people like I mentioned HERE:

Capturing shit on film is kinda weird anyway, isn't it? I mean, who knows where you might be in a picture somewhere. Some family from North Dakota get their picture taken on the Boardwalk, you happen to be walking behind them and there you are, on some mantle in a room in a house in a town you'll never even know exists. Maybe in 1983 you took a picture, and beside a tree in the picture happened to be a girl you end up meeting and marrying 20 years later. Same with movies - e.g. the last scene of "Valley Girl," when the camera pulls away, showing the LA freeway packed with cars. What if you were in one of those cars? There you are, on film forever. Kinda creepy. Hell, there's even shots of unknown people that have become "standards", shown anytime there's a show about some subject. Like the girl screaming into the fence while the Beatles played Shea in '65, or the girl running to her father coming home from Vietnam. Anybody in the Zapruder film. We see these shots over and over; whatever happened to these people? They alive, dead? What's their story, what'd they go through in the ensuing decades? Become anybody, have 5 kids, date Tony Basil? The teenagers cracking eggs on the heads of the SNCC protesters in Woolworth's (or Montgomery Ward?) - what become of them? Would they do it again if they could, or are they ashamed of their actions of that moment? Somebody needs to find all these people, the people on the periphery caught forever, caught as part of history. Find these people, tell us about them. Now that would be a coffee table book I'd read.

Sounds like a precursor to my FOOTNOTES series...