Pin-Up Of Christopher Hitchens

I saw the photo of Hitchens which accompanies, I presume, the article in Men's Vogue. I found it, however, in an article by "Gawker". I read all the comments first, while the photo was downloading, and thought it must be absolutely hideous, but then I scrolled up and voila! It made me smile. Impudent is the word that comes to mind. What I love about it is that he's smoking in the shower. YES!

And really, it's not bad either. I love the smoking in the shower part so much I may have to print it out and hang it on a wall somewhere. It would be my first-ever pin-up.

I was 12 years old when I said to myself: "I'm NEVER getting married!" I felt I knew, at 12, that I would never be married, and I attributed this to the fact all my girlfriends hung photos of their teen heart-throbs on their walls and I had no such desire. I thought it was "stupid" to put up photos of people they didn't know and would never meet. I had no negative connotation of marriage at all, but I remember that moment, thinking I was different in some way. Not, "I like women instead" different, but just different. The pin-ups weren't the other reason I felt different. I remember having friends tell me, in 5th, grade, that I talked "funny". I asked how and she said, "You say 'canvas oxfords' instead of 'shoes'". WELL! I thought, there were so many kinds of shoes and they all deserved description...and no one cared about it but me! (The angst.)

When I first saw this photo, though, I thought "pin-up", and that I had to have it on my wall. I suppose I take after Granny, my poetic and nutsy grandmother, who has pin-ups of cake in the bedroom she and my grandfather share. I walked in one day, and saw all these torn out magazine photos of cakes: chocolate cake, vanilla cake, and slices of cake. I didn't even ask, and felt a little sad that my grandparents were becoming SO advanced in...age. And then, my grandmother told me one day, laughing, that she had pinned up photos of cake because my grandfather liked cake so much. She'd done it intentionally (I was relieved to find out). She called them "cake pin-ups" and put them there for him to lust after and drool over. It was a joke.

On Granny's side of the room, there are no pin-ups, but she DOES have a very large stuffed purple dragon which lies across the back of a couch in the livingroom. It makes her smile, she says and she gets very upset if anyone disturbs the dragon.

There is room in the family collection of oddities, for a Christopher Hitchens pin-up. Knowing how conservative they are though, it would meet with disapproval unless I made a paperdoll type of towel to fasten around his midrif as the shot goes just a little bit below the navel. NO belly buttons allowed in THIS caste!

I don't know if I should put it in my bedroom (no...I think not) or the bathroom (YES!). I'll have to frame it to keep it from wilting.