fat-bottomed girl

[devi]

fat-bottomed girl
Originally uploaded by bluedevi

I wasn't intending to make a snowman. Snowperson. I just sort of found myself doing it. I got off work early - none of my afternoon students showed up. (The rest were having a snowball fight in the little patch of park next to the canal.) So I got off the bus a few stops early, went through a hedge and up the hill to the golf course, where there were expanses so blank and white they confused my eyes, and that mixture of weird breath-caught hush nearby and distant shrieks of delight from sledding kids, which I do realise has already been described by everybody on LJ but is still wonderful first-hand.

Earlier today I arrived at the cafe on Gloucester Green where I have my lunch to find a massive snowman maybe seven feet tall, counting the traffic cone on his head, and several middle-aged men in hi-viz jackets lounging in the chairs in front of the cafe, laughing and taking pictures. I stopped and stared and asked them "who made that?" and they said, proudly, "We did!" He was your classic snowman, three big snowballs in a stack and twig arms, pennies for buttons down his front. There was another one in the courtyard of the flats this morning, with an umbrella and a bikini and bits of dead grass stuck to its head in an approximation of sun-bleached surfer hair.

So I wasn't planning to make a snowman, and then I was just going to make a standard three-snowballs one. Then I stood back and hmmmed at the hip-waist ratio and spent the next half hour or so feverishly sculpting, soaking my gloves through, remembering The Snowman cartoon from my childhood and wondering why there are so few snow-women. Thinking of a conversation with parallelgirl after the Antony Gormley exhibition in London a couple of years ago, about how a male statue can be seen as just generic-human, while female ones are assumed to be about specific things - femininity or sexuality. Then I came home to find she'd been out building snowmen too, and had had almost the same thought process while watching a kid anxiously removing accidental breasts from a snowman, because heaven forbid it'd look like a snowwoman!

I was sorry to part with the snowwoman. She looks sort of calm and stable to me. But by then my boots were leaking.

Comments

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

We gave this guy dead-grass-dreads, but it didn't occur to me to make him a surfer dude! Maybe tomorrow.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Aw, he's brilliant. He looks kind of taken aback, in a sleepy muppetish way. I can certainly imagine him with a surfboard.

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

Very detailed for a snow person!

[dracunculus.livejournal.com]

Your snowwoman is lovely!

[juliet]

That is an awesome snow-woman.

(I am sad to be missing the snow. Maybe I should acquire a bucket & spade & do sand-people instead.)

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Well, I am envying your surfing! So there.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Outstanding!

[lathany.livejournal.com]

Lovely snow sculpture - dead impressive.

[parallelgirl.livejournal.com]

*grin*
I loved this post! I'm glad I wasn't the only person interrogating the gender of snowpersons today!
*beam*

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Speaking of which, I just came back from the shops to find the bikinied surfer snowgirl had lost her bikini, gained a new head and become an anatomically correct, well endowed and rather... excited snowman. Heh.

[parallelgirl.livejournal.com]

How funny...maybe I'm being exceptionally feminist this morning, but I don't think that would have happened if she'd been a sexless snow'man' in the first place- like, the fact she was female (and already sexualised) makes it a shorter leap to much further sexualisation.

But yes, hmm. Snow hard-ons! You don't see a lot of those around, do you?

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

Cool (literally!). There were a couple of blokes building an igloo in Cambridge yesterday. I may have to walk home that way and see if they finished it.

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

She has a nice face.

mykreeve and I were going to do a snowwoman, but then we decided it looked more like a Dalek...

[paste.livejournal.com]

wow, she is gorgeous!

there are people sledging down the road behin dmy house, i get the perfect view of them gathering momentum then hitting hte curb and bouncing off. i shouldn't laugh really as it looks like it might hurt but i find it amusing that nearly every single one of them is crashing!

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Were they going back for another go? If so presumably they don't mind that much and you have a free pass to laugh at their misfortune. If not, well, it's still funny.

[paste.livejournal.com]

i haven't watched anyone go twice, i get bored waiting for them to trudge up the hill. it's gone all slushy and wrong now so no more sledging on it today at least.

[freya-bean.livejournal.com]

awesome snow-woman :) I'm envious, our snow hasn't been lying long enough to do anything with :(

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I was really jealous of London earlier in the week when they had theirs. Maybe you'll get yours yet...

[freya-bean.livejournal.com]

the snow has been falling fairly heavily this evening, i'm hoping it hasn't all disappeared by tomorrow morning!!

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

love thwe face

[davefish.livejournal.com]

Great stuff, I bet she makes the rockin' world go 'round.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

More snowmen should have snowbrows, to keep the melt out of their eyes. Good work!