About the Casino de Paris

In a Facebook comment on this picture, RobertHeatherYoung (aka Heather) writes, "What's with the naked lady in the back?" She writes that she thought this was a painting of a jazzercise class but that she didn't remember any naked women. "Tell me what your inspiration is," she says.

That's a great comment, because it hadn't occurred to me I might be depicting a jazzercise class. The inspiration is this: when I was a young man, having just finished a Mormon mission in Austria, I toured Europe with my parents. In Paris, my father said he wanted to go to the Casino de Paris, a cabaret-type show with sexual innuendos and displays throughout. When the show began, a naked woman on a trapeze bar was lowered from the rafters to the stage.

My mother, who had not realized just where my father had taken us, put her hand to her mouth and said, "Oh laws, we should have stayed at the Evil Tower."

This piece, then, is a commemoration of our trip to the Casino de Paris.

Woman with Tomatoes

I took a snapshot of this woman carrying her tomatoes in Dorfgastein, Austria five years ago. It has been lodged in the back of my brain.

At the Cafe Möhring, Berlin