The Finest Woman Around
Saturday, December 03, 2016
In September 1977 I was a healthy not quite a middle aged
35 year-old man. I was hanging out on Vancouver’s clothing optional Wreck
Beach. I had opted for the no clothes. I was minding my own business, smoking my pipe (tobacco) when
this woman lay down on a nearby log. She had the shortest short shorts and legs
to blind a battalion of Hussars into submission. The only other person I have
ever met with a gluteus maximus to blind a second battalion of Hussars was
Tarren.
I was supposed to be a professional photographer and only a
few months before I had obtained assignments from Vancouver Magazine.
I didn’t think I would dare, but dare I did and went up to
her (unclothed?) and asked her if I could snap some pictures. She said I could. At that moment I took out
an exposure meter. That is when she told me, “You didn’t tell me you were a
professional photographer.” I managed to take a few shots (6 Kodachromes with
the date September 1977 stamped on them) before she angrily moved off.
In the mid 80s Carole (her complete name is Carole Segal) was living in a punk rock mansion with perhaps the finest bassist this city has ever had. For reasons that are in my faint memory my writer friend Les Wiseman and I visited the punk mansion to interview somebody (not the bassist). As we moved from room to room on our way to the kitchen we passed by a bedroom in which on a dresser there was a minute string bikini. We knew whose it was and Les Wiseman used (he was silent for a while in some sort of shock) that word he so often used to describe beautiful women, “That must be Carol’s the finest woman around.”
Now even then I appreciated women for more than all their charms and virtues. Segal was spunky and intelligent. She never whispered (I am going to just say she was assertive).
Not long after she started a band and I went to one of the shows and snapped a few including this one with Simon Werner.
It was in the 90s that I found out that Segal had become a photographer. Not wanting to miss my chance I suggested her as an item for Vancouver Magazine and I was able to photograph her.
With Vancouver Magazine editor Malcolm Parry I like to think we share something that I call the Ukraine Geographical Position. We know that Ukraine has no mountain barriers or large rivers that must be crossed to invade it. Thus the Chinese, the Huns and lastly the Germans marched through it.
Parry’s office was such a place. His door was always open
and in marched, politicians, writers, strippers, lawyers, hoods,
photographers, illustrators, poets, novelists, musicians, wrestlers, boxers,
rock stars, detectives, architects, etc.
Since I always managed to be around I managed to photograph them all, including the divinely fine Carol Segal.
With a little help from my friends (Editors & Art Directors)
