I may have cut an angelic figure in these
1968 school photos, with my big eyes and
snub nose and Huck Finn smile, but even then
I was up to No Good. My occasional girlfriend
was called Mickie ("Hey Mickie, you so fine, you so fine you
blow my mind, hey Mickie!"). She used to lure me into
the alley in our down-at-the-heels South St. Louis
neighborhood and wheedle me for a session of practice
in kissing. She had a darting intrusive tongue which
always tasted like hot cinnamon candy.
Flash forward to 1982,
when I was
an archaeology student at Southeast Missouri State University
(SEMO)
in the bucolic squalor of Cape Girardeau. SEMO's greatest claim
to fame is that Rush Limbaugh fled the place. I
stayed. I was having too much fun playing with the skeleton.
The classmate who took these photos
insisted I do something serious in the second shot. Here I am
at work on my lab project, re-assembling with Duco cement a
fragmentary human being I dug up in a salvage excavation.
Gruesome,
you say? At
least I never balanced a skull on my palm and said, "Alas, poor
Yorick. I knew him well," like three or four other archaeology
students I could name. And if I had, I would have gotten
the line right. (Photographer: H. F. "Jay"
Riggs).
copyright © 1997
William Brame
Reproduction or distribution of any of the
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without written permission of the artist.