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A friend of mine, a Honolulu haole lady with hair gone white and a
voice a little brittle with age, discovered I have taken photographs of
women without clothes. She began to reminisce about a bit of modeling
she had done, half a century ago, indoors in a studio and, once, at a
nearly empty stretch of sand beyond the beach called Waikiki.
Single then, and earning her master’s in English while living on
a grad assistant’s meager monthly stipend, she was grateful, she
told me, to earn what seemed big money, two dollars an hour,
posing for sketchers and watercolorists, and bigger money—
ten dollars, imagine that!—paid by the man with a camera
who admired her through a viewfinder as she frolicked in
the frothy surf in the shallows by the shore.
Once, taking a break from posing for a night-school drawing class,
when the art students had “gone outside for a smoke, I suppose,”
the young woman walked from easel to easel to see how she looked
on the paper of the sketchpads. “Some were pretty good,” she told
me today, recalling what she’d seen, “but some had put nothing more
than stick figures on the page. Well, that’s okay, I thought. At least
they must be getting some pleasure from observing the human form.”
♦
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