gossip girls (2023) (Patreon)

Well, Nevada City had a living history day yesterday when I went, which I did not realize before I arrived. I feared, initially, that this would mean I couldn't do photos there, as the historians/reenactors would be busy with their vignettes and wouldn't want someone coming  in with a camera and messing up the vibes. I of course forgot that anyone will to dress in mid-nineteenth-century clothing and perform daily life for a bunch of strangers is on the exact same shit I am constantly on, and they were not only happy to help me get my shoots, but also to pose and perform with me. 

So for this vignette's shots, I'm mostly gossiping and drinking with the ladies for most of the photos, lmao. This one wasn't the most technically complicated shot I had to figure out, but it is the absolute funniest one and also the best-lit. 

Anyway, there were two filmmaking friends there shooting a documentary for fun (just freshly graduated from college, bored as hell with no jobs thanks to the strike, I assume) also who saw me shooting photos throughout the day; right as I was about to leave they caught me to ask what I was doing. I told them about the self-portrait project; they interviewed me for an hour and a half about it.

The entire experience verged on surreal for a lot of reasons, obviously, one of which was just that here I am in Nevada City, MT—an old west town arguably most famous for vigilante hangings—and being treated vastly more kindly than I've ever been received... basically anywhere else in Montana. The entire drive out there, I lost count of the number of take-America-back flags I saw; many of the small towns leading to Nevada City are places I would not stop alone. (The county went 70% for Trump in 2020; the last Democratic president the majority voted for was FDR in 1940.)

Then I get there, and people in lifted trucks wave at me as they drive past because they like my old dresses and the reenactors all call me lady and ma'am (and they're not employees; they aren't obligated to) and I get interviewed for a documentary specifically because of my trans take on the American culture and the Old West. I don't actually have any broader lesson to draw from this yet, it was just weird, in a good way. And the shots were great.

The only moral I've found thus far, I suppose, is that I had a really good Saturday.