![]() The lady teased my hair and painted my face with blush, powder, and lipstick. Eventually, I chose a black fringed coat. ![]() This I remember clearly: I did not want to pick my style. This was the moment to choose your Glamour persona: nautical, motorcycle chic, cowgirl, Hollywood starlet? The feather boas, hats, rhinestone jackets, cowboy hats, curlers, hairspray awaited our selection. They invited us in, and we flipped through an album of potential looks. Ashley says she remembers a fog machine I must have blocked that out. They had rearranged the room into their own photo studio: a hair and make-up station on the round table, a photo backdrop and a rack of clothing and accessories squeezed in near the bed. A man and woman were running the show, probably in their forties or fifties. I wish I remembered more about walking into the room when we found it I’d wager it smelled of hairspray and cigarette smoke. We parked and searched for the room number along the doors dotting the motel’s perimeter. We drove out to the Super 8, pretty new at the time, in a small retail development about ten minutes out into the county, next to the Arby’s (shoutout to the 5 for $5 roast beef special, a family favorite back then) and just down the hill from a large flea market, coincidentally. Now Glamour Shots were suddenly in her town? Of course she was going. And only a few years before, Teresa had been a successful pageant mom, with Ashley winning beauty contests across the state. The flea market factor was at play: a city amenity now available within minutes. The notion that a grown woman would take two young girls to a hotel room to be photographed by strangers has never ceased to alarm me but also doesn’t surprise me. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. ![]() Like this story? Get the latest from the Daily Yonder directly in your inbox, twice each week. Teresa loaded us into the back of her red 1990 Lumina and headed to this makeshift studio at the local Super 8. Her daughter Ashley and I are the same age, and we spent days and nights together like sisters. (If you think these quarantine days are long and meandering, try spending a summer as a 12 year old girl in pre-Internet Eastern Kentucky. Nonetheless, when my cousin Teresa found out some enterprising soul was bringing a Glamour Shot-esque setup to Hazard, I went along for the ride. My sense of distrust was exceptionally high if they might come near me with a curling iron and feather boa. There was no glamour in my preteen existence, despite many failed perms, and I had long held a healthy level of distrust of school and department store photographers who wanted me to smile for the camera. I was awkward, overweight and already as tall as most of my teachers. I recall it was near the mall food court, where I would have been scarfing down a slice from Sbarro before going off in search of CDs and books, hoping for a chance encounter with a University of Kentucky men’s basketball player who of course would have been shopping at the mall at the same time as me. The closest Glamour Shot portrait studio to Hazard was, of course, two hours away in Lexington. You walked away with glossy 8x10s of the moment to remember forever and with the knowledge: This is who I could be. Draped in boas and pearls, fur wraps, silk gloves, fringed jacket and cowboy hats, your makeup was bold, your hair teased and shellacked. Within an hour session, you went from Brenda the homeroom mom to Brenda the sexpot and you had the photos to prove it. Imagine a Snapchat filter applied in real time, real life. Women would pay hundreds of dollars to be transformed into fantasy versions of themselves. In the 1990s, nothing said mall middle-class luxury experience like Glamour Shots. To understand this flow of goods and services into the mountain economy is to understand how I came to get Glamour Shots at the Super 8 motel. But it was thisclose to the real version, which was for many too out of reach – both by distance and dollars – for the imperfections to matter. The trade off, of course, was wearing a slightly damaged Tommy Hilfger t-shirt. You wanted Abercrombie cologne, designer boots, or heart surgery? You headed down the Daniel Boone Parkway out of Eastern Kentucky to Lexington.Įventually, though, knock-off versions of those t-shirts, purses, and shoes would pop up at mountain flea markets, at half the price, spread across tables, hanging from clothes racks and peg boards, mixed in with craft items and As-Seen-On-TV specials. In Hazard, Kentucky, in the early 1990s, the two-hour drive to the city of Lexington was a necessity for many things: advanced medical care, shopping malls, bookstores, fine dining.
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