Anne of Carversville | Impromptu Photo Session | Unretouched & Real

A dear friend wants to know what I look like these days — up close, personal and no retouching.   

You can’t understand the relevance of these photos without understanding how I got here. That is the story I tell in Sensual and Superyoung, my online manuscript. 

Marilyn Visitation

I never know when Marilyn’s coming, but I am so incredibly pleased to find her not only alive and well inside me, but thriving and breaking out of her self-imposed cocoon. 

When I first began the image-taking this afternoon, I saw my grandmother Marie everywhere in my face. Truly, I am only a Roscoe visually, although the Swedish, Danish and German genes express themselves in the totality of me.

Forget the hair which only looks Scandinavian and suits me best.  It’s fake, but I will die blond. 

Marie was English and very hip, although apparently only with me. I could do no wrong with her, and it’s always great to have someone like that on your side.

To be someone’s favorite, at some time in your life, seems not too much for any of us to ask for.

I once had a profound dream with Anais Nin and my grandmother hashing out the subtleties of eroticism in Marie’s living room. Not too many grandmamas make that kind of appearance during sleep-time, unless they are French or Italian. 

It’s important, too, not to neglect my other grandmother Clara who suffered tremendously from devastating arthritis and was bedridden until she got her hair done on Saturday and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. 

Clara read her poems to me and sat in a wheel chair making the most spectacular May baskets, sewing crepe paper ruffles into flowers and making garlands for my doll buggy. I don’t recall if we had prizes for the best doll buggy in the parade or not. I only remember that both my buggy and May baskets won the beauty prizes hands down. 

It’s rather strange to have two grandmothers show up out of nowhere, followed by a photo-taking session far more complex than I expected to take, when I opened my eyes this morning. Before we make up Hallmark stories about my afternoon, this life is not filled with continuity. 

My journey to selfhood has involved getting off the path and returning to those doll buggy days, where I really did have all the answers. Truly, I was smart as a whip at age 3. It’s adulthood that messed me up.

With all our stories on body image and photoshop at Anne of Carversville, I promise you that the photos are absolutely untouched. Not even color or contrast. And while I will return to botox and filler when the economy improves, there is none in these photos.

This is the real deal Anne, and whatever I do with this face in the future, she will always remain true to Marie and Clara, two old-fashioned  girls who didn’t have the luxury of my independence, my rights as a woman or this journey into a Sensual and Superyoung life.  Anne