melhara’s Reviews > When We Were Brilliant > Status Update

With your tiny black camisole stretched low across your breasts, you pivoted on spike heels, stuck out a hip so that the black stripes of your stretchy slacks slithered down your curves, and threw a slit-eyed sneer over your shoulder like a smutty Betty Grable.

I just had to look up the Marilyn lookalikes/replacements, Sheree North and Jayne Mansfield.

Sheree North:


Jayne Mansfield:

"...you slumped on a bench and clutched your hair in a topknot, the sheriff and his deputy smirking down at you, waiting for you to perform. You looked up at me from under your arms as if to say,

See what it's like?
Oh, I did."

You slumped back, knock-kneed, on the chair. "This is nuts!"
"Understatement." When I brought my camera to my eye, you threw your arms out as if shot, then chortled like a girl as I photographed your amusement.

Your gaze trailed back to the reflection of the plain, pudgy girl, the gritty orphan fixing her hair.

"Juana. The funny, bold child I'd left behind. Of all my photos, the curators chose hers, and rightly so. Her vivaciousness, and her parents' love for her, radiated from the photo. I'd captured love so pure that it was almost hard to look at."

"She is like a little girl jumping rope."
Were you? Did little girls jump with their fists clenched at their sides? The anxiety in those hands said everything. You - New Marilyn, Old Marilyn, Norma Jeane - were under a great deal of stress.

The Greatest War-Photographer in the World: Robert Capa

"I supposed I was now an official photographer of Her Majesty the Queen."

"But unlike in your other studio portraits, you didn't look like you were trying to be sexy in these - you were sexy, though fully clothed. Dressed in a heavy sweater, you leaned on a mandolin in one. You seemed relaxed and artsy, wise for your twenty-seven years.