THE GUY IN THE PINK SHIRT:

I had the stroller and was waiting at the lights of Beverly Drive and Wilshire when some youngish entertainment industry suit asks me what I’m doing with the camera. I figure I’ll give him a one sentence answer. I say, ‘I’m walking the whole of LA and talking to people I meet on the streets and making a film about what happens when I do’ but really I don’t say all that coz I get as far as ‘walking the whole of LA’ when the lights change and he just grunts and disposes of me - just starts walking off in his pink shirt, his hands in his pockets, his colleague keeping pace and they resuming their conversation as if he’d never been interested, never asked me a question - as if I’d chased him down and stopped him in his tracks and begged him to listen to what I’m doing, to participate in it. As he walked in front of me I ached for him to slow down so I could catch up and just ask straight out what happened to him that makes him think that it’s okay. What sanctions him to be an assh0le? His job? His shirt? I’m genuinely curious coz maybe then I could cultivate some understanding, but meanwhile I’m fed up of feeling like a welcome mat with a ‘please wipe your feet on me’ sign as I have done the whole time I’ve been doing my project in this area. The most gutting aspect has been not to be able to get any of it on tape.


CAMILLA PARKER-BOWLES

A Camilla Parker-Bowles look-alike with her two teenage daughters are walking along the north part of Beverly Drive. Camilla’s trying to read the blurb on my stroller as we walk in step with each other. She looks very curious about what I’m doing. So I hand her a postcard. She takes it and reads, at most, the title of the project and the first sentence of the blurb. She lets out a reflexive, high-pitched chuckle like a little nay from a neurotic pedigree horse. And then she motions to give the postcard back to me as if merely holding it for too long would infect her. I look her in the eye and say to her, in an even tone, ‘You don’t want to keep it?’ I want her to pause for a moment and see a breathing , feeling organism in front of her. Then she burps out, ‘No!’. Her tone is low, disdainful, cold. She wanted to tell me something in that ‘no’. She wanted to tell me that I was a piece of sh!t.