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It was the highlight of our visit to the fair, something we'd promised ourselves for a whole year. We gladly handed over $2.00 each to pass under the canvas flap and see Gabora change from a beautiful blonde maiden into a rampaging gorilla. Inside the tent, it was simultaneously hot and cool, away from the sun's glare, but with a heavy, hot canvas smell that seemed to connect us with a different time. A Caligari moment. A middle-aged man with aviator glasses, a ball cap and a grizzled, gray beard pulled the curtain to one side.
The spielman told how Gabora was captured in Africa, most likely the victim of a "cruel experiment" to demonstrate the truth of evolution. Straight from a Poverty Row script, a PRC 
production starring the decrepit Bela Lugosi, working for morphine money, and a man in an ape suit. Gabora was visible at the back of her cage, standing still as death, a somnambulist with fairy-tale golden tresses spilling down her shoulders. She seemed strangely distant. Our eyes couldn't quite focus on her. She was kept in a trance and tranquilized for our safety, he said.
Her trance was also necessary to effect the transformation. "Think gorilla, Gabora," the spielman said. "Think gorilla. Gorilla gorilla gorilla gorilla gorilla," he chanted. The image of the girl faded and was replaced by that of an angry gorilla. "Come to the bars and let the people see you, Gabora," the man said. The lights in the cage suddenly went down. Gutteral sounds, almost like speech, were heard. Hairy hands grasped the bars and shook them. Suddenly the cage front fell with a shattering clang, and the man with the microphone urged us to flee, flee for our lives -- ducking through the canvas flap and stepping out into the glaring sun of the midway.
Gabora seems to have become modest over time. In 2007, she was depicted as completely topless, though inexplicably without nipples. At her reappearance in 2008, she wore a demure fabric applique over her breasts.
Shot No. 10 from my last pack of Polaroid SX-70 Blend, an overpriced but serviceable way of rescuing the peerless SX-70 model 2 from the sad fate of being a dust-gathering collectible and putting it to work. As you can see from the greenish tint of the image, the film is over two years old, and the chemicals have become a little unstable. Unfortunately, it seems like Blend, which was made in Belgium, has disappeared, following Polaroid's shutdown of their European film facilities. There's a fellow who for $20 will sell you a neutral density filter that fits over a pack of Polaroid 600, which can then be inserted into the SX-70, after the pack's little plastic fins are sliced off. But even standard 600, staple of the Polaroid One Shot, is getting hard to find. And the price is going up as supplies diminish. I saw a double pack of 600, 20 shots, at WalMart recently for close to $30.
Flash provided by a vintage flashbar salvaged from my dad's Polaroid Pronto RF outfit. Not an awful camera exactly -- it featured split-image rangefinder focus -- but the slow plastic lens was perfectly inadequate to anything but the most rudimentary image making. In the early 1970s, he paid around $90 for it.
If I can score some more 600, I may just run a pack through the Polaroid Sun 660 that I bought at 
Value World for $3.83 -- never used, the neck strap still has its factory clips on it, and the colorful late 1970s tags are still attached. The Land List says the lenses for this model were plastic, but it qualifies that parenthetically with a question mark. The lens on my Sun 660 is crystal clear, whether it's plastic or glass. I'm curious to see how the sonar-based autofocus system works.
It's all like a race against time. As for my lovely SX-70, it breaks my heart to see such a first-rate camera become obsolete.
UPDATE:
I was able to peel the neutral density filter from the top of the empty SX-70 Blend pack and it's ready to slap onto any 600 pack I might purchase. Sweet!
A brilliant day on Lake Erie, late summer, wind brisk from the northwest.
Fuji Reala 100.
It was the highlight of our visit to the fair, something we'd promised ourselves for a whole year. We gladly handed over $2.00 each to pass under the canvas flap and see Gabora change from a beautiful blonde maiden into a rampaging gorilla. Inside the tent, it was simultaneously hot and cool, away from the sun's glare, but with a heavy, hot canvas smell that seemed to connect us with a different time. A Caligari moment. A middle-aged man with aviator glasses, a ball cap and a grizzled, gray beard pulled the curtain to one side.
production starring the decrepit Bela Lugosi, working for morphine money, and a man in an ape suit. Gabora was visible at the back of her cage, standing still as death, a somnambulist with fairy-tale golden tresses spilling down her shoulders. She seemed strangely distant. Our eyes couldn't quite focus on her. She was kept in a trance and tranquilized for our safety, he said.
Gabora seems to have become modest over time. In 2007, she was depicted as completely topless, though inexplicably without nipples. At her reappearance in 2008, she wore a demure fabric applique over her breasts.
