OMG, I have to tell you the craziest story about this night… but he just moved the one he was already holding even closer to his face to get a better look. I tried to casually insert a picture of myself onstage wearing a miniskirt and an electric guitar into his hand. In the picture I’m also eating a bag of Doritos, helpless laughter exploding through my big, nacho‐cheesy smile. To my great frustration, however, he kept digging deep into the bowl, oblivious to my offerings, and ended up pulling out a picture of me at around age sixteen, standing in my friend’s driveway with ratty long hair, twiggy arms, not a breast yet in sight, wearing a blue T‐shirt that said to a teNNIs player, loVe meaNs NothING. What I was really doing was sneaking any picture where I looked sexy or cool or world‐travel‐y to the top of the pile so he’d be sure to see it. I’d dumped a couple of hundred pictures from various parts of my life in there, and while we sat and drank beers and sifted through them, I was actually only fake‐sifting through them. I remember being in my twenties and hanging out in my Manhattan apartment with my boyfriend at the time, looking through a giant bowlful of photographs that I kept on a table in my living room.

The audacity to be you