your body is a wonderland

i majored in fine arts in college, as most of you know.  how i made the leap from the art department to a law office is a story for another day, but for four years i spent my time in phillips hall at the university of tulsa, taking classes in photography, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, and arcane art history classes with titles like "visual art of post-world-war-II great britain."  of course, i was simultaneously pursuing a degree in literature, so i was also taking english classes with titles like "apocalyptic prose of post-world-war-II great britain"

point being, i came from a very small conservative town and found myself, at 18 years old, right smack dab in the middle of the two most liberal departments of the most liberal college in the state.  to say it had an impact on me is an understatement.

in the art department, you are required to take several courses (painting, drawing, or sculpture) with live models as part of your core classes.  i remember my first day of life sculpture so well.  it was the second semester of my freshman year.  we each sat around on our wooden stools with tiny round tables in front of us, and a big bin of dried-out communal clay.  it didn't really occur to me as i sat there that "live model" would mean "nude model."  when class began, the professor gave some cursory instructions as he waited for the model.  

she walked in wearing a silk robe, stepped up on the platform, and disrobed.  i was taken aback by the frankness of it all, but by the second or third class it had become completely normal.  the feeling was probably aided by the model herself, who was the best figure model out of all of the different models who worked at TU while i was there.  she could hold a pose for what seemed like an eternity, and she never moved an inch, unlike the department's sole male model who would twist around and screw up my drawings.

but the most notable thing about helen is that she wasn't what you would expect from a nude model.  helen was a seventy-five year old black woman.  she had been modeling for the art department since the 1960s.  i hesitate to even use "black" as a descriptive here, because her race should really be irrelevant.  but somehow it's not, because when helen started modeling, the world was a very different place.

watching helen through my years at TU really had an impact on how i think about the female form.  my body is obviously not what it was this same time last year, now that i'm a mom.  but every time i pick up a magazine and start to feel bad about the way things are vs. the way things were, i think back to those days when my 105-lb-self saw grace and beauty in a woman whose body was dramatically inapposite to popular definitions of beauty, and i feel much better about the current state of things.

i wish more women could do that.