When You Wish Upon a Star

Last night I went to Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill to hear Rosecrans Baldwin read from and talk about his new novel, You Lost Me There. I ran into our friends Philip and Linda Carl there.  Philip, a molecular biologist, immediately began talking about one of Gene Smith’s photographs from the 1955-57 Pittsburgh series.

The photo depicts a young woman alone on a sidewalk at night, dressed in a skirt and sweater with sleeves rolled up, leaning on a parking meter.  I know it is the Shadyside neighborhood from other photographs I’ve seen from that night. The young woman looks forlorn, belying the festive ribbons hanging over the street.  Something hadn’t worked out the way she hoped.  In the background there is a Texaco station.

The photograph was published in my Spring 1998 DoubleTake magazine piece, “W. Eugene Smith’s Unfinished Symphony,” and it was in my 2001 book, Dream Street. It was also the cover image on Brad Leithauser’s 1998 book of poems, The Odd Last Thing She Did.

Philip said to me, “That’s the most lonely feeling photograph I’ve ever seen in my life.  It’s devasting,” he seemed moved as he was talking.  He was shaking his head, “That Texaco sign in the background…gosh, that is one hell of a photograph.”

What about that Texaco sign, I asked.  He said, “You know the song, ‘When you Wish Upon a Star’…”

I’ve been looking at that photograph closely for nearly fourteen years – it’s one of the few photographs in Dream Street or The Jazz Loft Project that we laid out by itself on a right hand page with a blank white page facing it – and that tune had never occurred to me.  But now that Philip mentioned it I don’t have any doubt it’s what Smith was thinking.  Written for Walt Disney’s Pinocchio in 1940, the tune was used in the opening for the Disney TV series that premiered in 1954.  It was an icon for a country emerging out of the Depression and WWII, before Vietnam and all the political assassinations.

We wish upon all kinds of stars, Smith thought, including gasoline companies in a culture then increasingly dependent on machines.  It’s the kind of pun, or modern mythology, that he went after in Pittsburgh; “equilibriums of paradox,” he called it.  It makes me wonder if Smith posed the picture.  Maybe he didn’t.  It doesn’t really matter.  But I wonder if that woman is still alive.  I’d like to ask her.