something else funny...

Once there were these 2 friends/neighbors in art class. Who were not at all stingy (in their affections). They could like each other and also like other people, too. (Exes, cute Jewish girls, these 2 fabulous Latino brothers...) She (the girl) liked to draw pictures of peoples' faces. Him...not so much.

There was this one day when she was on the bus talking to him. "So," she said, "theres this one girl at school and she's really tall and pretty and she has long black hair and she's really beautiful..." "Oh, really." "Yes. I'd really like to draw her...You know, I noticed that I like to draw pictures of girls a lot, for some reason, I don't know...maybe, I'm not that into male beauty..." she stopped because she sounded quite awkward. It was not such a nice highschool, it was easy to say something weird-sounding and get made fun of, and she had a feeling she'd just said something kind of weird, so would he make fun of her? But he did not. "Oh, yeah, I know what you mean, me too, I'm not into male beauty either, I'm into female beauty, all the way." And then they both laughed and she felt better.

But later, when she was in art class, she thought she might like to challenge herself. Why do I always just draw pictures of girls? She thought. Maybe I've just swallowed some kind of a societal standard. I think I will draw one of a guy. So she did. Maybe she at first was trying to make the guy look like one of the Latino brothers (who both cute, in different ways, the older one, she met first in P.E. class, she liked him. The younger one, in her typewriting class the next year, also seemed interesting, but it wasn't quite the sort of intense kind of like that she'd felt for the older one). Anyways, maybe at first she thought of him, but then the person she was drawing actually just became a figment of her imagination. She used her pencil and did all of this smudging, so the skin became darker and the eyes and the nose were a bit different, and she made it kind of look like it was nighttime in the sky behind the person and made this sort of vague, stormy landscape. She was quite please with the result. He was of uncertain ancestry, like maybe he was part Latin, part Arabic, part Indian or something.

Other people came over to look at it. Who knows, t first they might have said things like, "Well, thats very nice, but you know, smudging is so unprofessional for an artist, I don't recommend you do that." "Thats a very interesting drawing, you know, so and so's drawing is more technically accurate, but yours, well it really seems like it tells a kind of a story." And then, some people said, "Hey, do you know who we think that drawing looks like?"

And she looked at it and thought...Uh-oh...