First, there's this from about 1974 (when I was 23). I'm sitting on the steps of our rather horrible tenement building on East 91st Street in NYC and wearing the kind of parka that everyone wore back before down jackets:
I fancied myself an artist back then, and I worked in strange day job that involved classifying the editorial content of all the major magazines. I read magazines every day and wrote code numbers on them with a red china marker and made $6,500 a year.
This next one is a duplicate made long ago from a Polaroid. It's really washed out and faded. It says "October 1976" on the back in my mother's handwriting, so I am sure that is the correct date, in which case I was 25.
1976 was my year of retreat from commerce. The company with the magazine job collapsed, and, with husband and cat, I moved back to Ann Arbor (or, more precisely, Ypsilanti) and lived on savings. But that's enough for now. This is a blog, not an autobiography.
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72 comments:
Hey, I lived on East 89th in the late 1960's, in a building that had to be as big a dump as the one you were sitting in front of. My first job in New York paid $5200 a year. My wife made $3000. We lived pretty well on that.
I fancied myself an artist back then..
I don't see the artist but I do see the struggling part which always seems to go along with artist.
In the second photo I ...oh...nope can't see much there......
I see the artist. Take a pretty girl, dress her up as unattractive as possible, presto--an artist.
Temperature must have been fairly low in that second pic.
Try using the 1976 polariod as your Blog Homepage photo for a week and chart the new traffic. Just hearing the new commenters reactions will be fun.
"major major magazines"
You'll find it's a Catch 22 to inflate your resume like that--unless you're a Democrat.
What are you holding in picture 1?
I wonder if Simon has stopped gasping.
What are you holding in picture 1?
It looks like a padlock to me.
I'm guessing, sunglasses.
Peter, truth be told - as it has been when "pictures from the archive" have been posted before - I find her more attractive as she is now than as she was then.
This guy made a lot more than $6,500 a year and yet the best he could do was a pair of jeans with a split in the crotch.
Go figure.
Ypsi huh? My dad's mom and dad, his 2 sisters and brother moved there from the South. My dad and mom only went as far north as Mishawaka IN.
One of the things I truly miss about visiting Ypsi is Bill's Hot Dogs on Michigan Ave. By chance did you ever have one Ann? I still remember the loose meat hamburger in the hot dog bun. Heaven. And the root beer attained nectar status for a kid who hated root beer.
Do you have any books on sports ?
The top picture looks like the album cover for an exceedingly morose folk singer.
Prof Althouse,
Please take this as a compliment- in that second photograph,you are quite the looker.
Your tenement and job remind me of another young woman: Francie Noln in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; she gets a job in a Manhattan newspaper clipping service and emancipates herself in the process!
But the first picture of Nicholas Bradford from Eight is Enough brings back a lot of fond memories.
That was a great show.
Smugglin' peas, or at least a pea, in that second one. But wayyyy hot.
will there be live-blogging of Suber Bowl ads?
blake: Hilarious!
I'm not watching the Super Bowl, but I did nip down to see the National Anthem, and thought she did most excellently. Isn't it terrible that I can't remember the singer's name right now? Jennifer something.
I noticed some of the football players were singing along -- NBC should've just showed the football players that were singing with Jennifer's beautiful voice.
So, in October of 1976 it was kind of chilly?
Jennifer Hudson.
One of those unattractive chubby girls. Heh.
Don't know who the first one was. Faith Hill?
We're in for a baaaaaaaad and long depression. Those first Super Bowl ads sucked.
The Audi one with Statham was cute.
You had a cat??
Those some nice looking tits. Great rack. You could serve dinner on those things.
I bet they are fun to cuddle up to on a cold winters night.
OK, so Simon is in love her, got that. Is Bissage too? And Peter Hoh? And Tradionalguy. I also think Troop has the hots for her. There is quite a bit of passive aggressive give and take going on there.
Another good question would be if any of the commenters here scored with the Divine Miss A.
When she and I meet we are definitely going to get to 2nd base.
Is there sexual tension during the meetups?
I have been to Ypsilanti. Home of Eastern Michigan. I had competitions there when I was in Drum Corps.
Is Ann Arbor and Madison similar?
What is the best big ten city?
Is the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis? If so, that is probably the best.
Irene said..."You had a cat??"
I've had 2 cats over the years. Both bedeviled me. I actually did a 3d scan today of me with Jasper when he was a kitty. I'm going to put that up later (after I digitally dust it).
Titusiseatingaquesadilla said..."When she and I meet we are definitely going to get to 2nd base."
Not if you keep chickening out. And don't give me the "it was cold" routine. When are you returning to Madison? Let's do a Madison meetup when you are here. You know your mom wants you to visit again.
"What is the best big ten city?"
Duh! Madison!
OK, sounds good. My parents are in Arizona until the beginning of April. I will have to go home in April. Can my mom come to the meetup? She is pretty fabulous. No we can't have her come because I will be too restrained if she is around.
titus, the only national company I saw with an advert today in the State Journal was for a position in Fort, not in Middleton. I thought you said the job was in Middleton.
MadisonMan that ad was supposed to run today.
I tried to find it on Madison on line but it was a bitch trying to go through their help wanted sight because it is linked in to Hotjobs.
It is a line ad. The position is a Compliance Specialist/Quality Auditor. Can you look again? The position is in Middleton.
I haven't gotten any resumes today either from that ad which is pretty weird. It is linked into our HRIS system and none of the resumes that I received today said they came from that ad.
I want more autobiography please.
Thanks doll.
Well, you shouldn't have stood me up that time. I might have told you all my secrets.
Enough, we will get together in the spring.
Don't make me feel guilty.
I have intimacy issues.
The rare clumbers are looking at me right now. They are constantly looking at me. I fucking love that.
I fancied myself an artist back then
And the difference between then and now is?
I bet then no one actually believed your fantasies. Now, you have a stable of fans who actually believe your rather mundane photos qualify as art.
Freder - I bet then no one actually believed your fantasies. Now, you have a stable of fans who actually believe your rather mundane photos qualify as art.
Said by a guy who truly believes what he says passes for intelligent commentary.
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Oct '76 is a nice one. It has a softer, older "feel" to it - and not just from the sepai color or polaroid "fuzz".
I've seen a lot of pics, movies in them from the day...you can tell at a glance what decade they come from..
I wonder if we have that capacity in most of us, our own mental "time and date" stamp - to see a "people" shot and almost automatically know when it was taken?
I agree with people who said you're as hot if not hotter today, fwiw.
I used to get much more embarrassed looking at old photos of myself, whereas now I feel almost protective and even exasperated to remember how hard I was on that kid.
Yeah - you look better today. And the current "Laughing Ann" profile pic is a keeper.
It used to make me rather sad to come across discarded photgraphs at the thrift store or in estate sales.
Now it seems more tolerable. The faces speak to no one in particular, and the stories can only be guessed at.
Human entropy; photographs fade, lose their defenders, or become as unimportant as unwanted books or dishes.
You seem younger, or less burdened, in the second photo, even though it was two years later -- and no, not just because of the Carly Simon No Secrets thing going on.
1976 was my year of retreat from commerce. The company with the magazine job collapsed, and, with husband and cat, I moved back to Ann Arbor (or, more precisely, Ypsilanti) and lived on savings.
Might a link from an earlier Althouse post help explain why you were "so much older then" and "younger than that" later?
City dwellers want out
"City residents disproportionately are more likely than people living in other types of communities to say they would prefer to live in a place other than a city," Morin says. "Fewer than half of all city residents say there is no better place to live than in a city."
A smaller proportion of women express the desire to live in the nation's largest cities. "Women are less drawn to big cities," says Robert Lang, co-director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. "It could be safety."
Wanting to live outside cities doesn't necessarily mean people reject urban lifestyles, however. The appeal of developments with an urban flair — ones that combine housing, stores and offices in a neighborhood setting — is growing.
Freder - "Now, you have a stable of fans who actually believe your rather mundane photos qualify as art."
Are you kidding?
Simon and others literally worship the ground this woman walks on.
It's really kind of creepy.
In the second photo you look beguiling and interesting. You know some secrets worth knowing that you'll share for sufficient blood and treasure. In the first photo you look active in some god awful cause....I would have liked to think that the second photo was taken by someone who loved you romantically, but mom's handwriting indicates otherwise. At any rate, you look alluring in the second photo and that's the girl men who were attracted to you saw. The first photo looked like it was taken by someone who wanted to break up with you......When you visualize a woman you love, the face becomes soft and gauzy and the nipples stand out. The woman you want to leave: harsh winter lights illuminate a haggard face against a shabby background.
I turned twenty-one in November, 1974. Had I encountered your parka-clad loveliness before Richard got to you or before my wife-to-be and I began dating on January 11, 1974, I might have made a play for you. (Of course, I think that we can safely say that such a "play" would have been futile, on mu part) But alas, Ann and I were married on August, 1974, and remain happily together today. My Ann was a Art Ed major and spent some time after graduating from Ohio State working for both the Columbus Museum of Art and for the Greater Colubus Arts Council.
We lived in a horrible apartment after we were married, a subterranenan deal that afforded the added benefit of allowing ua to watch dogs hump, often involving an active, undersized male and a coterie of surprisingly quiescent larger female dogs. It was an added mode of entertainment, along with TV, AOR radio statins, and my growing collection of vinyl LPs. (A male chihuahua seemed especially horny...er, romantic.) No real artisitic inspiration there.
In fact, 1974, was one of the best years of my life. Marrying my Ann was wonderful. I definitely married up and it was the best move of my life.
Besides no self-respecting OSU grad like me would have been interested in seeing a UM girl.
Your job in NYC is interesting. About the same time, I wangled myself an as-needed position for the former president of Capital University. He was doing consulting work with universities and I was his research assistant. He claimed that I had a knack for finding materials from among the education, business, and financial journals I was charged with perusing to buttress the arguments he was making for budgetary process married to planning, something a bit wifty and over the top in those days.
Meanwhile, attempting to pursue the artistic side my Ann insisted I possessed, I wrote songs all the time, something I really started doing when I was about eight. Since than, I've composed gazillions of mostly incomplete songs. Maybe I'll finish some and tack together the incompletes the way the Beatles did on 'Abbey Road,' then make an LP of my own, showing me on the front cover in a parka, sitting st the same address as Althouse in the first pic. The LP will become a huge hit and people will wonder what was the inspiration for the LP. Their answer will come when Ann Althouse writes the liner notes for the second edition of the LP, accompanied by a beautiful painting created by my Ann.
Or not.
Yes boys, the brickhouse really looked hot with her Mindy hair; and you can tell by her look, she knew it.
Funny. It seems just about everyone prefers photo number two.
That’s all fine and dandy . . . entirely predictable and I have no problem with that.
But I prefer photo number one.
Why?
I guess because the girl in the first photo looks real. She looks like the kind of girl I would have actually been interested in talking to, back in the day.
In fact, I wanted to talk to that girl so much I went down to the basement and fired up the old time machine.
We went to the park and sat on a bench and we had a nice chat but I think I might have gotten a little too drunk.
What?
None of you believe me?
I suspected as much . . . so I made sure I memorialized the occasion with a little photograph of my own.
Here it is.
Ha!
P.S. And for the 6:07 link crapping out . . . ia.media-imdb.com/images can BITE ME!
your humble blogger
Hahahahahahahaha.
Your funniest line in a long time!
Ann said: "Well, you shouldn't have stood me up that time. I might have told you all my secrets."
This is true, I speak from experience - when you meet up with her you have to hear THE cat story.
We have a young brunette(red?) Ann and a current blonde Ann. My mom is 85 and has never dyed her hair. Other ladies in their eighties still dye their hair. Why is that?
I think that William nailed it. The second picture has a softness, a wistfulness, while the first picture is as sharp as a knife's edge. If I didn't know, I wouldn't have guessed they were of the same woman.
Wait a minute, a blog in many ways is an autobiography, but not in the literal sense.
Picture No. 1:
Ann's schoolgirl days, of telling tales and biting nails are gone,
But in her mind,
She knows they will still live on and on,
But how do you thank someone, who has taken you from crayons to perfume?
It isn't easy, but she'll try,
"If you wanted the sky I would write across the sky in letters,
That would soar a thousand feet high,
To Sir, with Love"
http://www.bghappy.com/lulu/lulu-to-sir.jpg
I can't believe people are attributing the focus of the camera and the deterioration of the print to moods and attitudes I might have displayed 30 years ago!
The disappearance of half of my nose an mouth in Pic #2 is a big clue. Why the nipple retained its definition, I don't know? I had 2 of them too. I still do!
Anyway, Pic #1 was taken by my then-husband with a German SLR camera. I can't remember the brand name. Something you don't see around anymore. I may have it somewhere.
Pic #2 could have been taken by him or by one of my parents. I really don't know. I wasn't good at posing for pictures then. In most of the pictures, I'm clowning for some stupid reason, probably because I thought it was morally wrong back then to manifest any kind of vanity.
Hi, Ann!
Pic#2 shows Prof. A's influence over Amanda Marcotte:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2301/2436746316_a9acd269eb.jpg
(I had to call her "Ann" in the previous post to keep the scansion.)
The disappearance of half of my nose an mouth in Pic #2 is a big clue.
As an experiment, you should keep photo #2 under the same storage conditions a while longer to see if the unilateral deterioration continues.
Unless, of course, you would care to give us a careful analysis of some of Althouse's photos, explaining in detail just WHY they are bad.
Where did I say her pictures were "bad"? I said they were mundane. You might want to check a dictionary as to the meaning of words. And not impute opinions to me that I never held.
Re-examining the 1976 polaroid for 1/2 of nose and mouth reveals that the left side is entirely missing. How could one not have seen that before. The eyes overwhelmed us into seeing no further. How do women do that? It must be a trade secret.
Freder is the enemy.
When you stop to think about it, the beauty of Daisy Buchanan was not locateed in Daisy Buchanan but in Gatsby's fantasy of Daisy. She was "the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us". The faded parts of the polaroid invite completion and fantasy....It is impossible to underestimate the effect of a round, perfect breast on the male imagination. The female breast exists not to feed infants but to feed the infantile fantasies of men. If I had to fill in the features of the face that was connected to that breast, I would make her out be the lady that needed letters of transport or the dame that I knew was trouble as soon as she walked into my office or the girl I wanted to hold steady while she balanced on the prow of the Titanic.....I think it's kind of cool that the other features faded but that the bullseye, the true north that moves the needle of the magnet, remained as visible as the green light off the dock of Gatsby's property.
Hi, Richard!
whooaaaaa!! What a babe!!
I just linked to this old post today, and for some reason I'm now able to tell what I'm holding. It's the camera case. Richard is taking the picture using the camera, and I'm holding the case, a brown leather case for a German SLR camera that had been my father's. Can't remember the brand of the camera, not the most familiar brand, maybe something that's defunct now.
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