Doo-Wop Doggy and Jean Harlow

Yesterday's Plain Sight left off with a question:

What does the dancing frankfurter Doo-Wop Doggy have in common with the original "Blonde Bombshell," Jean Harlow?

When you grill a hot dog you want to turn it so that all sides are done equally.

Taking pictures is a little like that.

The first part of the food truck I saw was the front. (You can see it by clicking on yesterday's post, "You Ain't Nuthin' But a Hot Dog," above or on the right side of this page).

I took some pictures through the boxy front windows, but they amounted to nothing.

Then I walked around to the side that faces the curb, with its sliding glass window and counter.

It seemed promising, but it was in shadow, and though the counter was speckled with bright green seed pods fallen from the tree overhead, I couldn't get the pieces of the puzzle to fit.

I discovered Doo-Wop Doggy on the driver's side. Those pictures ran yesterday.

It was curious to find a big orange Shell gasoline emblem on the side of the truck along with the guitar-strumming hot dog and the menu items seemingly glued on (and painted over) letters. But those quirks came together.

Before I got to the driver's side, I walked around the back. And that's where I found Jean Harlow. A faded metal Lucky Strike ad with her face and name on it was nailed to the back of the truck.

Above that was a yellow plastic thing whose purpose was hard to figure--maybe a rack for a small hose.

On the upper right was an old Pepsi sign. Branches and leaves from the tree hung down over the back of the truck.

It was just odd and unexpected and seemingly random enough to be intriguing and challenging. The challenge being to make it look not so random and therefore not so odd.

The metal portrait of Harlow was deteriorated in such a way that when I zoomed in on it on my  computer, I was startled to see It looked like a bunch of overblown pixels.

Did I zoom in too close? Did I accidentally reduce the resolution of the camera to its minimum?

No, the rest of the picture was totally sharp.

What was cool and uncanny was that the disintegration of the portrait anticipated perfectly, by perfect accident, a visual phenomenon--the overmagnified pixel--that would not come into being until decades after the screen siren's era ended

Well, it struck me as cool and uncanny. You'll let me know if you think it's a yawn.

In any event, now you know what Doo-Wop Doggy has in common with Jean Harlow.

They are riding around together somewhere in New Jersey on a weird white hot dog truck.

Either that or they are beginning to moulder together in a junkyard somewhere.

Tags: Morristown | photography | hot dogs

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