Rose Colored Glasses

Old dogs and new tricks have always proved a tricky prospect, we know that. But I could never teach my dog Cooper any new tricks even when he was eight months old, so maybe I have bigger problems. I do know one thing: I've driven past a certain brick wall in Arlington at least 10,000 times in the last 20 years, but it took my bride and groom from last week's wedding to point out what I've been missing all these years.

But let's wait a bit and start at the beginning.

I first met Pam Dodge and Lawrence Luk a year ago in Paris. Well, not that Paris, unfortunately. This was the foam core one that stands next to Ballys on the Las Vegas strip, where folks can buy all sorts of Eiffel Tower memorabilia and eat all kinds of pastries and convince themselves that they don't ever really have to leave the U.S. and visit the real city. Yeah, that one. (See last week's post below.) Ugh.

Anyway, Pam and Lawrence were in Paris for WPPI, the annual wedding and portrait photographers' conference. I was there because Lexar, the folks behind those compact flash cards, asked me to speak at their booth. Lawrence is a fine young photographer himself and he and Pam were nice enough to sit through my presentation, like, three times in a row.

(Or maybe they were just waiting patiently for Denis Reggie, one of the original "rock stars" (tee hee) of wedding photography, a guy who is certainly pleasant enough but has the incredibly peculiar habit of actually referring to himself in the third person. Mick Jagger, maybe. Dennis Reggie? I don't think so.)

Anyway, one of the things I tried to convey during my WPPI presentations was the importance of freshness. When you've photographed more than 400 weddings it becomes increasingly more important to stay alert. Not Last Week's Wedding is how the mantra goes in my head. It's easy to slip into routine after all these years--part of the reason there's so much burnout among wedding photographers.

A few months after the conference Pam and Lawrence called me to tell me they were getting married. I was happy to shoot their wedding--after all, they actually made me look like I had groupies in Vegas. Seriously, I've always been looking forward to their date because they trusted me so completely, something that is, truthfully speaking, very important to me. Plus, they were starting their wedding day with a dim sum feast. Who could say no?

Digression Number One: I am a sucker for dim sum. When I worked for United Press International in Los Angeles in the early 1990's dim sum was a midday fixture. Every few days I would meet my buddies Ronal Taniwaki, of Nikon, and Bert Hanishiro, of USA Today, at Ocean Seafood, a huge restaurant in Chinatown. Ron and Bert would explain the difference between har gao and siu maii (I'm using the Wiki spellings here), and why one should never, ever pass up the pork buns. Those years of intensive dim sum consumption would not be wasted.

I moved back to the east coast and for the next ten years I worked at USA Today in Arlington, Virginia. In the lobby of the old USA Today building, as fate would have it, is the largest dim sum restaurant in the Washington area, China Garden. And when you work at a newspaper you get used to working on Sundays--somebody's gotta put out the Monday paper, right?--so it was all too perfect to stop in each week for dumplings.

So when Lawrence and Pam said they were starting their wedding day at China Garden, it just seemed like good karma.

Digression number two: Always pay attention to the karma. Years ago I was late for a meeting with prospective wedding clients when I got stopped for speeding. That damn trap on Rock Creek by the Lincoln Memorial--I should have seen it coming. And when I saw the officer writing up the ticket in my rear view window I knew I was nailed. But the officer said this instead: "I'm not sure why but I'm just going to give you a warning." And I said this: "You're a good guy, officer. I promise I'll do a good deed for someone in return." I then drove to the studio, met my couple, asked them what they did for a living and heard this: "I'm a police officer."

Okay, back to the present.

One of the cool things about doing weddings is bumping into people you know from all sorts of places. One of Pam and Lawrence's friends is Emilie Sommer, a wedding photographer from Maine who interned years ago at USA Today. And then there's Ron and Kathleen Ngiam, whose wedding I photographed some seven years ago. It was great to see them after all this time. As I was photographing Pam and Lawrence and their respective families, Ron and Kathleen passed by. I looked over and the light was amazing, an orange rim around Kathleen's hair, and I had this incredible deja vu.

Okay, enough already, you're saying. Get to the part about the brick wall. What did you notice for the first time?

Well, here's the deal. Wilson Boulevard in Arlington County has seen a lot of change since I first moved to Washington in 1988. The Sears is long gone, the Vietnamese restaurants are slowly being pushed out, and the used car lots have been replaced by Cheesecake Factories. Oh, well. So much for the "Keep Clarendon Weird" graffiti that once marked the side of an old garage.

One of the cool remnants of old Clarendon that has not yet fallen prey to development is the OK Used Car sign, a rusty throwback to another era. Pam and Lawrence asked to be photographed with that sign and I was happy to oblige. Anything but the Jefferson Memorial, I thought. So we went, we parked and I shot. Neat and funky, but nothing earth shattering. Then Pam said, "Could you shoot one of the other "OK" sign?"

"What other sign?" I said.

"The little one, behind us."

And I looked at a wall I've passed countless times in the last twenty years and said,
Oh, that one."



















Matt