The Original Jo
I came home from work and painted this one night, after meeting with a woman who had had a little too much to drink. Jo had ended up in the emergency room because she had talked about wanting to die while she was intoxicated. She had been required to sit for hours in the ER while her blood alcohol level came down enough for me to talk to her, so she was tired and irritable. She had been crying all evening because her boyfriend had been sentenced to serve time in jail for spousal abuse and she felt responsible because it had been her that had been beaten up. When I saw her, her thick mascara had formed dark lines down her cheeks. She told me that even though she had talked of wanting to die earlier in the evening, she really would never do anything like that because she was a proud woman. So proud, in fact, that she called herself "the original Jo", pronouncing it "the original Ho", which made us both laugh. She told me that she loved her life even though most people would consider her a bad person and she confided in me that she, herself, had been arrested 81 times. I couldn't quit thinking about Jo for a long time. I've talked and laughed about the whole experience many times. A year later, though, this painting and the whole memory just evokes sadness for me.