The Probably Neverending Story

I sincerely apologize for the following story, and you may wonder after reading it how I could write this kind of thing. The answer of course is somewhat easily, but only because it actually happened.

I'm in a photography class. Last week in our last class before spring break - oh, by the way HALLELUJAH - we went outside and took a roll of film, just for kicks.

We were kind of trying to make a spectacle of ourselves, and take pictures of what we were doing in the process. So we took pictures of all of us standing really close together, frozen in motion (with me and another girl beating up our TA) and, my personal favorite, of us standing on either side of a bike path applauding bikers as they rolled by, just like in the Tour de France. Except, um...not really. At all.
We were having a good time, and were trying to think of someway to incorporate random people in our picture on purpose. We didn't know who they would be, but we wanted it to be, again, somewhat of a spectacle.

Then, we saw Soren.

Soren was a guy standing at the end of a walking bridge holding a sign that said Dick Cheney should be impeached. Completely alone. He said a rehearsed line to all that passed about constitutional violations and the like, and he became our random person.
A brave person in our group went up to him and asked if he would be ok with being in one of our pictures and, being the obviously, um, outgoing guy that he was, he agreed. We all walked over and explained the picture we would take. The class would sit in a semi-circle around him and he would start talking, or start to pretend to talk to us like we were little kids and he was telling us a story. Probably about habeus corpus or something equally enthralling.
Then something happened that I can neither explain, nor recall without reeling back in disgust, as I probably will be doing for eternity.
He turned to my TA (who had the camera) and said,

"I don't want to be in any pictures unless someone shows some nipple."


. . . .


Yeah. I wish I were kidding. Really I do.
My TA replied that those weren't really the kind of pictures we were taking, but....
Soren said ok, but could he provide the, um, requested uh, yeah?

Sure.

?

So the picture, which I'm sure will be a gem, shows about 15 college students sitting at the end of a bridge in front of a weird bearded man, holding a sign with the words "Impeach Cheney" on it, who happens to be obviously exposing one side of his chest.

As we walked away, he handed some of us business cards, which really were just pieces of paper about the size of playing cards with his name and email on them. His name - Soren Sorenson. I wish I had been surprised, because then the whole thing might have been just a little funnier. Alas, it is merely mildly nauseating.