Ponytails For Decency

A few weeks after an old lady attacked my bookstore owner friend (Eddie of Dencan Books) with the crumpled-up ball of my work comes word of a fresh complaint.

Stockings and garters and heels -- oh my!

A number of my more recent images, printed on canvas and framed, are hung in a store window down on Lakeshore Road in Toronto. When Candi and Jim, the store owners, put them up I warned them about the Bookstore Versus Little Old Lady episode and pointed out that two of the images in their windows were large renditions of my pin-ups. They laughed and said something to the effect that "Oh don't worry: this is the Lakeshore. Anything goes here."

So apparently last Friday a dual-ponytailed young woman, 19 or 20, came into the store and waited patiently to get Candi's attention. She insisted that those pin-up images were inappropriate and should be removed from the window. Candi said "rubbish" and the girl said, "but they are in their underwear -- women and children could see them!"

Candi, displaying her stubborn and mischievous streak, retorted that there's an enormous illuminated billboard down near the Gardiner Expressway (a 6-lane elevated highway that runs right through downtown Toronto) showing a man wearing only his Stanfield undershorts and that if she could get them to remove that, Candi would remove my pin-ups.

The girl left. But will she return with a mob? Stay tuned ...