Unflattering Film

You know those nights when you get all gussied up in your cute little top and actually DO something to your hair? You know, the night where you suck it up and don your painful strappy shoes and risk life and limb in the name of high fashion? It's the same night you dance around your apartment with the straightening iron and a glass of wine singing along with the pop radio station until you're fully pumped up and ready to party like the rock star you know you are.

And so you go out in your fantastic (in this case peacock) coat, struttin' down the street with "Pretty Woman" playing in your head, feeling like the hottest thing since sliced white bread, and you make your way to the trendy new bar where your girlfriends are waiting for you looking equally fabulous. Of course everyone has their breasts out on display, and you pretend that your 34A's look just as good as their 36D's and that your extra set of triceps aren't noticeable beside their stick-like arms (and they really aren't...as long as you're facing straight on).

After a few cocktails all's right with the world, and you forget that you couldn't fit one thigh into your girlfriend's designer skirt, or very nearly forget anyway. The night is great and fun and you feel sexy and successful as everyone laughs and smiles and flirts and you go home thinking you were fabulous and gorgeous and then...

you see the pictures.

And somehow all your girlfriends look just as great on film as they did that night, sexy and smiling, and you look, well...a bit like the Stay Puffed Marshmallow woman, your fat arms caught in every frame from the complete wrong angle. And how is it that even when you strategically position your head a few inches behind everyone else, your face still looms like a great basketball with hair - limp hair? How is it that the rest of them look so small and you look so bloated? How is it that you no longer have a "good side"? How can you look so good in your bathroom mirror and so frighteningly bad in a camera lens?

I'm afraid I have no answers, friends. Photography, like life, is unfair, unexplainable, and horribly unflattering....I'll drink to that!