Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan by Paula Marantz Cohen

Author:Paula Marantz Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-seven

It gradually DAWNED ON CARLA THAT THE BAT MITZVAH WAS meant to exist in two kinds of time: real time, which was fleeting and unpredictable, and recorded time, which was fixed and eternal. The whole point in hiring a photographer and a videographer was to embalm the thing in the process of its taking place—a strange, even morbid paradox that she tried not to dwell upon too closely.

She had originally thought of asking an orderly at Mark’s hospital, known to be good with a digital camera, to take the photographs, and have some of the cousins pass around the family’s camcorder for the video. But that idea had been nixed by her friend Jill.

“You can’t have just anyone do the photography and video,” said Jill. “You’re going to have this forever. Stephanie will want to show it to her children and grandchildren.” (The words forever, children, and grandchildren seemed to crop up again and again in the planning of the bat mitzvah).

When it was put that way, Carla felt obliged to consider the professional options available.

For the photographer, two candidates appeared to dominate the field. One was a middle-aged man who had been doing Cherry Hill bar mitzvahs for a hundred years and who took photos in the conventional mode (Grandma crying with pride while hugging embarrassed bat mitzvah girl; bar mitzvah boy sloppily cutting cake under mother’s distressed eye; friends of bar mitzvah boy, grinning malevolently, holding him aloft in a chair, etc., etc.). This photographer’s work was predictable, but predictable had its merits. Besides, he was known to be a genius with an airbrush. A couple of women at the JCC, no beauties, had praised him for making them look stunning.

The other candidate had a smaller but more vocal following, including the support of Jill Rosenberg, known to favor the cutting edge. This photographer was a young girl just out of Bennington College, a small and agile creature who could slip into nooks and crannies without being seen. Her photos were less polished than those of the veteran photographer, but they had the virtue of originality and candor. According to her supporters, she was adept at capturing moments that “summed up the essence of the event.” Typical was the photograph in Jill’s album that showed her, arm lifted in admonishing gesture, mouth open, as an implacable Josh sat slumped in a chair. “I look at that photograph,” said Jill, “and everything comes back.” Carla had perused Jill’s album (which included a shot of herself and Mark staring straight at the camera as if hit by a stun gun, a piece of bar mitzvah cake still clinging to the side of Mark’s mouth), agreed that the young photographer was enormously gifted (her work resembling that of the famed, if also famously troubled, Diane Arbus), and quickly decided to go with the boring, middle-aged photographer.

With the videographer the choice had been simpler. In this area, there was only one name that could be considered—everyone said so: the Steven Spielberg of bar mitzvah video, Cass Sunshine.

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