Children on the Death Slide

At the ripe old age of 11, my friend Betsy and I took an afterschool photography class. Here is one of our artsy projects, staged on the slide in the playground. The slide alone tells you the era, the lackadaisacal “who cares if children plunge from the heights onto hard pavement? WE DON’T NEED NO STINKIN’ GUARD RAILS” era. It’s amazing we made it out alive of that Death Trap of a playground.

Here, with multiple angles, I attempt to push a reluctant Betsy down the slide. Sheila: Betsy clearly does not want to go down the slide. What is your problem. Live your own life. Slide if you want to. Plunge to your broken-boned future if you want to. Leave Betsy alone!

Please note Betsy’s hippie-ish flowered sundress and my tomboy-garb of boy’s shirt, rolled-up jeans, and sneakers. Our personalities writ large.

I am a bully:

As a theatre kid, Betsy understood the importance of communicating – with her whole body – how much she did not want to go down the slide and make sure it reached the cheap seats.

Oooh. Existential.

Just look at the desolation of that Carter-era landscape. Can’t you feel the “crisis of confidence” just looking at it?

There’s a coda to this series.

Clearly, I got Betsy to come down the slide (in our fictional dystopia). And then what happens? I loom over her threateningly as she cringes in terror.

We should have done a second series of photos where Betsy got her revenge for being treated so poorly.

It’s Betsy’s birthday. We met in 5th grade and it was Friends at First Sight. Our instant bond involved: the Beatles, pretending to talk in British accents, our love of musicals, our acting bugs (we would watch Little House on the Prairie and critique the acting – continuing the theme, just last week out of the blue she sent me the new biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, with a note “Clearly, we both have to have this”), our senses of humor. My God, the laughter in our friendship was almost nonstop. In the 6th grade, our shared dreams came true when she was cast as Nancy and I was cast as the Artful Dodger in the school production of Oliver! – it gave us a chance to finally use our British accents. (And once again, in those roles were our personalities writ large. Open-wise-loving-pep-talker-optimist and my-#1-fantasy-in-life-is-to-dress-as-a-boy-in-order-to-survive-on-the-tough-streets. Thank God we found each other.) She is a deep thinker. Our friendship involved talks about God, interpersonal relationships, forgiveness, love, giving other people space. There has never been a gap in our friendship. We have never lost touch. She’s one of my forever people and I am very lucky.