Blonde Gas Station Girl

Mixed Media on Paper - 2018

There is a most remarkable young woman who works the night shift in a gas station/convenience store not very far from where I live in the Sonoran Desert. She has a personal style that is next to impossible to achieve in a part of the world where the sun shines all of the time, yet she has done it.

Almost everyone who lives in Arizona has some kind of suntan, at the very least a Farmer's tan. It simply can't be avoided, or it can if one puts their mind to it. This woman is as pale as an albino, except she isn't, because she doesn't have pink eyes. Her obviously natural hair is of the classical towheaded variety. She wears it, and she has a lot of it, in a style that would make Marie Antoinette envious.

She festoons this hairdo with vintage bakelite combs and she wears a lot of cameo jewelry. Cameo earrings, cameo necklaces and cameo rings on almost every finger. She pulls all of this off while wearing the polyester pantsuit uniform that is required of her by the multinational corporation that owns the joint. It is a marvelous contradiction. It is actually better than late 1970's punk style.

This is because while seeming completely sui generis, she is also gracious and demure. Another splendid contradiction. Where one expects the cliched angry young person, instead you encounter Grace Kelly. One night I was there waiting in line to pay for my gasoline when one of her colleagues asked her how she managed to stay so pale.

Her reply was "Just like the animals that live here, I don't go outside in the daytime".