I was invited to photograph a red carpet at the 2011 SproutCore WWDC Bash this Monday (photos here). The experience was very different than I expected. My initial expectations were that I would be a human photobooth. Someone who just presses a trigger at regular intervals, every time someone passes by. I was quite wrong about that.
Shooting red carpet is way more interesting. It gives you the opportunity to get a lot of different expressions from a lot of different people and also a great way to practice how to give posing instructions to clients. People were willing to do anything I asked them to do. It almost seemed like they competed against one another in a way. And since I am the judge, here are my favorites:
The Sterns co-owned a couple of restaurants in Manhattan back in the 1970s. But after the restaurant partnership fell apart in 1978, Nancy and John found themselves desperate. They had absolutely no income and had to scramble and reinvent themselves in order to survive.
Nancy packed a picnic basket with a chocolate fudge pie and an apple pie she baked and set ventured out to sell them. She sold all pies to neighborhood restaurants and came home with orders for a bunch more. Pie in the Sky was born. They were soon working long hours, starting at one in the afternoon and finishing between two and three in the morning. This is how they began catering to twelve New York restaurants thirty years ago.
They moved up to Maine in 1981 to live a different lifestyle. They bought a house that was a former grocery store. Their son Jesse was only three and my husband Brad was the same age. They soon became great friends. In fact, Brad mentions Jesse a lot in his childhood videos. One of my favorite is a video from 1988 where Brad opens his last Christmas present and then announces: "Jesse got baseball cards for Christmas, that sounds good for next year".
The Stern family continues to use AA unsalted butter, no preservatives, no transfats, and lots of hard labor to make these wonderful pies.
Nancy decorated her kitchen window with cute little flowers.
I had more than my fair share of their pies in the last couple of days. In fact, I pretty much lived on them. That's how good they are.
Besides pies, the Sterns bake other goodies, such as cookies and blondies.
One of their Yelp reviews says "The guy behind the counter wasn't very friendly either." I think it is clear who was behind the counter that day. It must have been Jesse. ;)
I wish Sterns a lot of cold weather. John mentioned pies sell fast when the weather gets bad. :)
We are visiting Brad's mom in Maine. Enjoying the ocean, eating brutally killed lobsters, super sweet blueberry pies, and other coastal yummies. While driving aimlessly through the side streets along the Maine coast, I noticed this little church. It was still too sunny and I also did not have my tripod on me, so I carefully planned to come back the next evening to take few long exposure photos of this church right after the sunset.
We came back as planned, the light was perfect, the tripod was on me, and I also made few mosquitoes very very satisfied that evening.
St. Peter’s By the Sea Episcopal Church was built by Nannie Conarroe in loving memory of her husband George with whom she spent summering at Bald Head Cliff since 1889. One thing I love about the U.S. is the signs of love everywhere you go along the East and West coasts. The beach walks are lined up with benches dedicated to the dead husbands or wives, and so are the little churches and chapels. I hope that Brad and I will have one of these testaments one day.
Did you know that queer kids have four times higher suicide rate? Did you know that 40% of homeless teenagers are LGBT who were kicked out of their house by their own parents? How can this happen?
I could not think of a better name for this post. In fact, it would make no sense to call it differently because I will be talking about the "It Gets Better" campaign by Dan Savage. Dan and his husband in Canada (and boyfriend in America) Terry came to Google today and shared the story of the campaign he and Terry started, what lead them to it, and what was the response from the internets.
As Dan pointed out, bullying is often something that goes away as soon as you come home from school. But not for LGBT teenagers. They are often bullied in their own homes, by their own family. That's why so many LGBT teenagers run away from home or get kicked out. And the rest of them stay in the closet pretending to conform with the gender expectations associated with the reproductory organs they carry. They are living zombies, waiting to turn eighteeen when they can freely decide their own destiny and find happiness.
LGBT activists have hard time getting invited to talk at middle schools or high schools. Parents often think that LGBT people are trying to recruit these kids to their camp. Or they think that they are some creeps trying to get their hands on their kids. That's why it is so extremely difficult to access the kids that need help the most.
Thankfuly, there are the internets and smart phones! Kids watch "It Gets Better" YouTube videos in their room, at night, under the blanket, on their phone. They watch adult LGBT folks talk about their own growing pains, bullying, and finding the happiness later in life.
My co-workers created one such video as well:
And so did the President:
Here is a moving video of two middle school teachers who in fear of losing their jobs filmed this video without speaking or showing their faces:
There were somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand (!!!) videos submitted to this day. In fact this campaign reached such a huge magnitude, that many middle schools started GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) groups. Lots of straight kids join the groups to show their support for their queer classmates. It became cool to be for the queer kids and be on their side. I am very happy this movement is happening, and hope it will keep killing hompohobia accross the Globe. Please do support the "It Gets Better" campaign and share the videos with teenagers and their parents.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 4:58PM 
