Dad asked “What horses?”

So here’s the thing: years ago, like in 1999 or 2000, I was at the flea market in Santa Cruz after one of Frankie and Tina’s legendary parties, and I saw the Barbie doll horses Honey and Midnight. I had Dancer as a kid, and my friend Samantha had Dallas, but I’d always desperately wanted these two, and I don’t think they were ever sold in Australia. They were obviously waiting for me in Santa Cruz so I bought them, and when Jeremy laughed at me very much, I told him tartly that they were part of an art project and that I was going to release them in the Japanese Tea Gardens in Golden Gate Park, where the bonsai trees would be to scale.

I went on a bit of an eBay frenzy after that, and picked up Dallas and Dixie and Prancer and a very scary-eyed bay version of Prancer, plus the little pinto pictured below and a non-Mattel bay. The idea was that Barbie and Ken had lost interest in their horses, so we were rescuing and releasing them to the correctly-sized wild. I actually carted the lot of them to Burning Man one year but never took any pictures. When we moved to Eugenia they ended up in the attic. Salome, who bought into the project years ago, kept nagging me to do the release, and last Saturday we finally got organized.

I didn’t take my own camera so I came over all director-on-a-movie-set and bossed Jeremy and Salome around: “Make sure you get lots of Midnight and Honey. They’re my favourites. No, Jeremy, it’s not funny to have giant squirrels looming in the background.” Jeremy’s pictures are up on imagestore already; Salome took hers with her awesome el cheapo plastic medium-format Holga, so those need to be developed and digitized. Eventually I’ll put together a proper Web site, or at least a Flickrstream or Shutterfly book.

Enduring image: Jeremy lying on his belly in the dirt in Strybing Arboretum, taking more and more pictures even as we tried to drag him away to lunch, and me saying to Salome: “I just wish he’d get enthused about my projects, you know?”

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