She was a living painting hanging above a gloomy stone staircase. A bit of sexual theater.
This anonymous sex worker, erotic dancer, or model earned her daily bread quietly contorting amid those bonfire colors. Behind her, other darker shadows danced like black flames.
At the bottom of the dark stairs below her window, a second woman wore tight jeans, knee-high boots, a long leather topcoat, and (to perhaps preserve anonymity) a distorted white face mask. She beckoned me to descend. But when Kate appeared by my side, my new friend made a subtle gesture that meant “Ah well… C’est la vie.”
We already knew that the area around Paris’s Moulin Rouge had long been tres risqué. Indeed it was! For in the fall of 2009, as Kate and I strolled toward that iconic Red Windmill, we passed shops whose gaudy neon signs blared “Sex Shop”... “Sex Shoppe”… “Le Sex Shop”… and (more creatively) “Sexodrome.”
But when we arrived at the place pictured above, what its signs said at the bottom of those stairs was unprintable. And in the light above them, a living, picture-framed vignette was sadly, beautifully surreal.
–Dave Powell is a Westford, Mass., writer and avid amateur photographer.
Don’t forget, if you’re already a contributor to 35mmc, and fancy submitting a one-shot story, please feel free to upload at your leisure – Hamish
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