Around 1978 I went to a bar in a hotel called the Drake on Powell Street in Vancouver.
A few years before a man called Gary Taylor had won a case in the BC Supreme Court that allowed him to serve lunch in a bar on Granville called The Castle. From then on until a few years ago people (mostly men) could eat a hamburger, drink a beer and watch a shapely woman take all her clothes off to music.
The Drake, in conjunction with the Number 5 Orange, were the two best exotic dancer (strip bars anywhere else in the world) places in Vancouver. It was there where this amateur ecdysiast saw his first stripper. She wore bangs, and had legs from here to there. But it was her face that made her be so special that only two other dancers (and I photographed many”) are in my pantheon of the finest.
Such was the length of her legs that she had one misfortune during her dancing days. She kicked up and broke her nose.
Another reason why she was my fave from that first time onwards, was her choice of music. She liked to dance to the songs of local bands. One of them was Maurice and the Clichés.
She posed for me many times. Before my Rosemary taught me to notice and photograph hands, Cheri P. knew exactly what to do with them.
My Cheri file is huge. In that past century I could only print the most important images. Slides were hard to print. Now with my scanner and my good Epson printer I have been able to notice all kinds of photographs of Cheri that I missed the first time.
It took me a while to figure out that her face and expression was pure Gioconda Gherardini. A colour negative taken with my medium format Mamiya RB-67 proves that. Today I noticed in a b+w 35mm contact sheet and almost exact portrait. She definitely had talent to spare.
The pictures that follow which show a chest that was perfect in proportions I believe I may have used Kodak Colour Infrared slide film. In order to sort of make the pictures look normal you had to affix an orange filter. There are little black bits which I removed from her face that is not dust.
In any case Cheri was one of my mentors who with her patience made me the photographer I am today.
