True Adventure: Photography Class!

Photography is a funny thing; Palm Tree Fan can take a picture and it looks just like a Thomas Kincaide painting, but if I took that same photo, it would just look like an old cabin with some trees around it. And if my friend Ethel took it, it would be slanted! Both Ethel and I are artistic in other matters, but neither of us has the least bit of talent in photography. At one point, when my point-and-click Vivitar died, I bought a used Yashika and tried to take pictures of my plants and pets. However, I was so busy messing with the f-stop that I didn't think about little things like, say, focusing, and when my photos came back from the developer, they had a little brochure included with them that was entitled: "How To Take Better Photographs."

Ethel tries to be creative with her photography, so creative that sometimes you cannot tell what exactly she took a picture of. Once she signed up for a photography class, but after the first session she said, "This is for people with REAL cameras. I just have an automatic one." You know, the old PhD camera - Push Here Dummy! I offered to let her borrow my Yashika, but she said maybe I should take the class. So I went to the second session and the teacher said, somewhat suspiciously, "You weren't here last week. What's your name?" So I did the only logical thing - I said it was Ethel Jones. She looked at the class roster and said, "Oh, you ARE registered!" and everything was cool... until the REAL Ethel Jones walked in the door. I thought, "Man, I am SO busted!" but the teacher recognized the real Ethel Jones and didn't ask her name. However, I felt it would be unethical for both of us to take a class that only one of us had paid for, so I dropped out. Or stopped being Ethel Jones, depending on how you look at it.

This is a typical move on the part of Ethel. On another occasion, we were traveling in someone's car to a state park, and she pulled an apple out of her knapsack and asked if I wanted to share it. Now Ethel is the youngest of a gazillion kids, and I think of her like a sister, so neither of us thought anything of sharing this apple as she took a bite, then I took a bite, then she took a bite, then I took a bite... When the apple was gone, she said, "Do you want to split another apple?" and pulled a second one out of her knapsack, and I said, "Ethel! Why didn't we each just eat our own apple?" She said, "I wasn't sure I'd want a whole one."

Famous Hat