Charlotte Harlots

BJ and his friend, Skip, Bee, and I stood out in front of the downtown public library of Charlotte on Saturday from 10-1, greeting people and networking. Thanks to a short piece written in The Charlotte Observer, people came to sign BJ's book and to meet both him and Skip. We interviewed a few people for our documentary, and even managed to collect some minor donations. Skip and BJ interviewed each other for our mutual projects, and when that was all over we did some fun filming for our documentary. I know that it would have kept me in college another five years but, sitting on the ground filming, I wish I had gone to film school. There was one summer I tried to convince my mother to send me to a summer program at NYU film, but it was expensive and she had already contributed to many of my earlier endeavors by posting bail money. I had thoughts and images exploding like fireworks in my head about how I wanted scenes to look, shots I wanted to shoot, sequences I wanted to film, etc., but without the direction, discipline, and experience for which film school would have provided a foundation. Skip had a very clear idea of how he wanted things shot; his experience comes from having viewed more movies than anyone I have previously met. This was one of the more difficult hours in my week, and it reestablished for me that I am performing in a capacity, as a cameraman and documentary filmmaker, in which I have neither formal nor informal prior experience. It is not my preferred method to learn--like learning Spanish by being kidnapped in Bolivia--but I'm learning at an exceeding rate, and I hope this is reflected in the shorts that will be posted from time to time of our experiences. I did have a chance to talk shop with a fellow freelance photog who arrived from Channel 14 news to film us and our endeavors to meet and greet the Charlotte public.

Bee and I left with Lindsay, our host from Couchsurfing who came to hang out with us for a while downtown, to fetch lunch at Burger King for Skip. On our way back through a plaza, we passed a legitimate pimp yelling at one of his girls. The passing comment we heard was something like, "Y'need to work during the week too, not jus' on the weekends!"

After all of the filming was wrapped up, BJ, Skip, Bee, and I went down to a pizza place to get an early dinner and watch the news, hoping to see a clip of us all on Channel 14. During our two hour stay, hordes of people in costumes kept walking by on the opposite side of the street, ostensibly on a Halloween pub crawl. From the looks of it, it was a well-organized event, and the collective costuming was impressive. The pervasive impression--I'm not complaining--left on me, and I have witnessed this tradition developing over the last few years, is that Halloween is becoming more and more a spectacle for women to parade around in scantilly clad costumes, as if it were an excusable novelty to dress as a seductive French maid or superhero strumpet, to later dismiss on a holiday whose tradition has been progressing more and more toward this result. I think my real issue with this is the general observances of holidays. Those who know me best know that I have issues with holidays, but that I generally appreciate and uphold traditions I believe in. Halloween was always a bigger holiday in my home growing up because it was also my sister's birthday. But, the older I get and the more time I passes, I am realizing how things change and how I'm not always comfortable with those changes. Still, the Alice's-in-Wonderland held my attention until I realized I was only sucking air out of my fountain soda.