Double Bass

"I think that guy playing bass with Dawn Landes was here last night playing with The Now Ensemble, " I said to Lauren.

"Did you draw him last night?" she asked.

"I think so," I said and showed her the drawing.

"It looks like him."

"I think it is."

Later that night, after the Balthrop show and a brief stop at Rockwood, Bernie and I were heading back to Brooklyn. As we passed over the Manhattan Bridge in the back of a taxi, he showed me some of the pictures snapped from the evening and we continued a conversation we had begun about caricature earlier in the day.

"Faces can be distracting places," I said. "Sometimes when I'm drawing, I have to only focus on the way the hair lies and worry about placing the eye and the bend of cheek and the bump of the nose later."

"My drawing professor used to say that you should draw what you see, not what you think you know," he said.

"I guess; When you really look close, nothing looks the way you think it does."

"This is a good shot," said Bernie as we zoomed in on a picture of Jeremiah, frozen in a moment between guitar notes, smiling with a room full of listeners, distracted and attentive and waitresses asking for orders and a club-owner whose feet dangle into the shot on a street near the bottom of Manhattan where it's easy to get distracted by both the forest and the trees.