Monday, January 28, 2008


Sometime in 2002 I came home after a photo job and I heard Rosemary scream, "He's dead. He hasn't moved."

I had left Rosemary in bed watching TV an hour and a half before. Until then every time Rosemary had asked to have a TV by our bed I had always said,"It's either the TV or me." Fortunately for me she had chosen me every time. But Rosemary had had a foot operation and she was bed ridden for at least two weeks so we called the cable company and had an extension brought up to our bedroom. I had left her during the beginning of Hitchcock's Vertigo. Mosca, her dear black cat was lying on the foot of the bed.


I nudged Mosca and he didn't move. I picked him up only to find out that rigor mortis had set in. He might have even died before I had left. The only cure to a dead cat, I soon found out, was an instant new one.

There is a randomness in today's blog that is not accidental. When weather is not good or I don't feel well I tend to try to file my stray negatives, transparencies and photographs that are in piles. One of the piles consists of pictures of people I don't remember or they are simply a symptom of the 35mm age when I shot several assignments (and even included personal shots) in one 36 exposure roll of film. I have been snipping them into order and then refiling them. In one negative sheet today I found three photos that had no relation to each other except I took all three around the same week sometime in the early 80s.

Mosca, our black cat on our fridge, happened, later, around 1986 when we had moved from Burnaby to Kerrisdale. Mosca was Rosemary's favourite cat and he was dear to her and he followed her everywhere. His coat was a slippery cool that made him a delight to hold. The negative appeared in roll that had pictures I took on a trip to the Seattle Art Museum.


On the contact sheet of the three other photographs here I found an exposure of a stripper's pool party that I had been invited to attend. The cream of Vancouver's exotics was there. On the bottom right that's the legendary Little Mary. Behind Little Mary is another Vancouver legend, Jackie Coleman.


The man with the guitar is Carl Perkins who had come to Vancouver to appear in a CBC variety show. I was the stills photographer. And the last photograph is of Hilary in our Burnaby home's shag carpet. We hated the carpet. You could drop a quarter and lose it forever. Even worse, at the time Rosemary wore contact lenses and...It didn't help that the carpet was an uncool dirty green.



We have no more shag carpets. Hilary is now 34 and her daughters, Rebecca (10) and Lauren (5) put on white socks and slide with glee on our wooden living room floor. Toby the cat follows Rosemary everywhere and best of all we don't have a TV in our bedroom.