The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023

38 MAY 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL note of insecticide. They had clearly gone to some trouble to make things presentable for the visiting exhibit. There is an apocryphal quote attributed to Andy Warhol that says something to the effect that everyone should have the experience of being famous for 15 minutes. That is a little of what it was like to be an American guide in a city where few people had any expectation of coming face to face with someone from the United States. I found the crowds to be mostly friendly, hun- gry for information, and fascinated with the exotic American guide creatures in their midst. I was asked by visitors if the guides were picked for their intact white teeth. People were surprised that we had gotten to our mid- to late-20s and beyond without acquiring any metal teeth. Another day I was asked if American women could have babies in five months. The questioner probably figured that Americans were so efficient at everything else that we must have been able to streamline childbirth, as well. In all three cities we worked, the people I interacted with were dubious about the American “melting pot” and very interested in guide ethnicity. I would tell them I was 100 percent American, but that did not satisfy them. They would persist, “But what is your origin?” When I told one Russian visitor that my father was Greek, he replied, “Yes, I saw a hint of the East [ namyok vostoka ] in your face.” He promptly followed that up with “I want to talk to a real American!” and headed over to the guide next to me who was a WASP poster child. During our training in Washington, D.C., we were given a lot of exposure (pardon the pun) to photography of all kinds and were provided with an extensive vocabulary list of pho- tographic terms. At the same time, we were told that Soviet visitors would be most interested in talking about social, cultural, and political issues. I found that while many of the questions we got were not about photography, there was actually a great deal of interest in detailed information about it. I thought that I was prepared to talk about amateur photography because I had spent a lot of time taking photographs with an SLR and printing my own photos in a darkroom. But I wasn’t pre- pared for many of the questions, including questions about the formula for the developer D76. It turned out that not only Kathleen Rose talking with Photography USA exhibit visitors. Kathleen Rose talking with Soviet press and officials at the exhibit opening for Photography USA. PAULSCHOELLHAMER PAULSCHOELLHAMER