There are a lot of ways you could stage a family photo shoot, and "in the bubble bath" is just one of them. If you were to crop the leftmost 75% of the following picture, you'd have a soapy, whimsical portrait of Joey "The Fat One" Fatone sumptuously bathing with his lookalike wife and their new baby girl Kloey (kind of like a little Joey, but with a K, and a vagina).
But then you have to take the remaining 25% of the photo into account, and that's when you realize that Joey thought it would be fun to be depicted taking a candle-flanked bubble bath with his NINE-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER Briahna. I don't know if you were still bathing with your mom and dad at nine-- not just bathing, in fact, but bathing sexily-- but in my family, by this point in my life, we'd given up the communal dip.
The composition of the image is also interesting to note, as Briahna, floating adrift near the faucet, weirdly looks like she's drowning, except her parents are too busy beaming about the new baby to notice, so she's squealing through gritted teeth, "Please! Please!" at some point realizing that her parents can't hear her over the Barry White music coming from the built-in bathroom speaker system, so she's just shut her eyes tight and is hoping that this will be peaceful, is thinking about how ironic it is that the Fatones have a huge pool out back, and yet this is how she's gonna go.
Maybe, maybe, maybe if we could see some shoulders and some straps and understand that Briahna Fatone jumped into the jacooztub after a big swim meet and that's not a grimace, but a smile on her face because she just nailed her heat, then I wouldn't think that this publicity decision was so fucking weird. Brent is also disturbed by how "incredibly tan" the family is, particularly the baby, but that really doesn't bother me as much because listen, this bath is in Orlando.
Speaaaaaking of tubs, four actors will be reading four of my stories this coming Sunday evening (8/8/10) at the gallery in L.A.'s Barnsdall Art Park, an evening that you can read more about here (click on event website for online ticket purchases), and one of these stories actually starts in the bath! No kidding. (Sad face: I wish I'd had the foresight to put a Fatone in it). Following yesterday's rehearsal, I feel compelled to note-- after realizing that writing about a gay mortician spitting in his palm before doing a goth teen under a DJ booth is made even more forceful by an actor spitting into his palm before an audience of your 70-year-0ld cousins-- that some of the material is probably not great for your lil Briahna's out there, so leave the kids at home, no matter how much they cry that they love to attend 80 minute literary readings. Okay?
Nice. In my wrap up of the last decade in film I lamented the realization that it wasn't, in fact, Joey Fatone who dies in Memento....
http://www.postdiluvianphoto.com/blog/2009/12/31/in-the-dark-here-in-the-dark-701/
Posted by: Michael Singman-Aste | August 04, 2010 at 10:20 PM