I met Lorien on the
beach around 1978. She was the girlfriend of my hairdresser. I took some
pictures of her. She was sweet and soft-spoken. Like many people in those days
she smoked cigarettes but she did so in a long Holly Golightly holder. A
private dick of the noir era would have said, “This dame has class.”
Quite a few years
later her former boyfriend told me that Lorien had answered a newspaper ad by a
Victoria
painter who was looking for a big breasted woman to pose for a book cover,
something to do with a noir private eye. Lorien picked up sticks and was off.
Around 1989 I had to
go to Victoria
to take photographs for a BC text book being published by Douglas &
McIntyre. While walking downtown I ran into Lorien who invited me to her house
to meet the painter. I remember we had very good spaghetti. And that was the
end of it.
In the last few days
of August I noticed that I could no longer sleep on the bed undraped. This is
one of the pleasures of the tropics and just for a few weeks we can enjoy the
simulacrum in the city of the cyan skies. I now long for next summer. In some
way Lorien’s pictures have been able to put a gentle halt of this waning
summer.
