Halloweening Salem-ites, your yearly extra efforts to make your costumes super amazing are much appreciated:

KEEP SINNING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:

Last year I photographed this be sequined drag queen greeting revelers in Salem, who were coming to Salem.

I was really hoping to see her again, because since I saw her the first time, I found out that her name is Gigi Gill and that she is something of a local celebrity in Salem.

Unfortunately, she was not greeting revelers on the way into the city.  In fact she looked a bit upset when I saw her.  Sad.  Very sad to see someone who seems to love Halloween looking sad:

The dog:

His thoughts:

1. Why is this lady photographing me?

2. Am I a dog?

3. Why am I dressed as a skeleton?

4. When am I going to be fed?

5. Why am I standing next to a guy dressed an an octopus?

6. Why are all of these people staring at me?

7. Am I going to end up on a blog the day after tomorrow?

Well, dog, with the last thought, you are correct!!!

As I’ve done for the last couple of years, I visited Salem this year.  There will be an entry upcoming about that and its generally merriment and hilarity.  Nobody does Halloween like the Salem-ites.

This entry though will be about another thing I saw this year in Salem.  The city was as usual taken over by a cast of characters of ghosts, goblins and this year, people protesting Halloween.  I had heard of this going on different cities in America, but I had never seen it up close.

There were people preaching, waving signs, telling all of us that we were going to go to hell.  There were other people yelling back at them, getting angry at them for spoiling everyone else’s fun.  I have to admit that even though I try to be accepting of other people’s points of view, I didn’t exactly enjoy being yelled at for being a sinner and being told I was going to hell.  It actually made me kind of angry.

But then I thought about freedom of speech and the whole idea of freedom as a transgression.  I heard someone say once that freedom itself is a transgression.  My freedom transgresses on someone else’s freedom and their freedom upon mine.  I guess our freedom to enjoy Halloween transgressed on the ideas of the Halloween protesters and they decided to transgress on our freedom in the process.

I guess if we want to keep freedom going as it is exists here, we have to accept situations like the ones I saw on Friday.

Photos:

So I love photographing swimming pools.  Unlike every other thing I have ever photographed, I cannot trace the origins of this.  I think it might just be my love of water or the fact that I have gotten a few good shots of swimming pools in the past and decided to keep going until I got another one.

I have seen some series of photos about swimming pools in different places with people in them, especially these old fashioned swimming pools that really made me appreciate that.  Or maybe it was just that going to a pool was such a privilege growing up that I just love seeing them.  I can’t explain it.

Well, this is another swimming pool shot.  But this one was taken in terrible, awful lighting conditions through a glass that had wires across it.  Awful conditions.  So I used the jaws of life on it and cut and adjusted until it looked the way I wanted it to.  Here goes:

I shot right into the sun.  Yeah.  I’m a big fat rebel.

With the rebel yell, I shot right into the sun:

Well, no, I am not 64 yet, but an important anniversary is coming up.  Next year it will be 20 years since my freshman year of college.  That is an unbelievable amount of time to have passed.  Somebody once told me that before you know it, 20 years of your life will have passed.  Well, I’m there.

But it is a milestone that I am experiencing in a very interesting way.  As a part of my work obligations, I take students to see colleges and stand where I stood with my parents, listening to people talking about dining hall options, class sizes, athletic facilities and what not.  I have to admit that I enjoy the process much more taking the students around than when I actually was a student.

One sort of highlight of those my own college visits was a trip to Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where we visited a “typical” college dorm room.  It featured a road sign that had been liberated from its rightful place on a highway and a pyramid of beer cans and bottles of Jack Daniels.  My father gave me a very subtle, rather unspoken sign that I would not be attending this particular institution of higher education.

None of the places I visited for college appealed to me at all and I finally came around to even somewhat liking the college I ultimately attended in a very funny way.  About a month before I was to leave for college, the school I went to sent a letter to my parents saying that there were rock concerts on the campus and that they had a lot of study abroad options.  My parents never let me go to concerts in high school and study abroad was something I had also wanted to do for a long time.  One day there will be a blog entry, complete with musical accompaniment and Bergman references to describe that.  So that was how I was convinced to even consider liking the place I went to college.

Well, have at it class of 2015:

And you realize life goes on:

Sometimes Boston Fashion File travels, but never too far from the center of its universe.

But as Diana Vreeland said, the eye has to travel.  This time, the eye traveled to the Rhode Island school of design to see some rather unusual fashion.  For the hermit in us all, this: