You Just Had to Be There

It was like a meeting of the Elvis fan club.

The group of people who gathered at the VMFA for the "Conversations: Elvis at 21" talk today included multiple people still plenty passionate about the King.

The speakers were photographer Jeffrey Allison and musician Terri Allard and they weren't so much lecturing as nurturing a conversation with the audience.

"Some of you are all about Elvis," Allison noted right off the bat. "I saw some blue suede shoes." And it was true.

Allison, also the Mellon Collection Educator, talked about what gave the photographs in the exhibit their definitive look.

Wertheimer was using a Leica SLR, the images were framed as he shot (so there was no cropping in the final prints) and he used only available light.

The quiet of the camera and the absence of flash meant that the photographer could be almost invisible to his subject, making for more naturalistic photos.

But it was during the audience's participation that the true fans showed themselves.

One spoke of her vivid memories of having seen Elvis at the Mosque.

"I tried to go onstage and tear his shirt off," admitted the middle-aged woman in the blue suede shoes.

"We were complete maniacs about him," another said without apology.

Yet another remembered her family being recently stationed in Japan and hearing Elvis on Armed Forces Radio and the effect it had on her.

One said that she recalled Elvis coming to her high school in a small town in Arkansas to play when he was barnstorming around the South developing his following.

In every one of their voices, you heard the passion of a true fan who had lost none of her enthusiasm for the long-dead singer.

Elvis has been recognized for having been an unusually focused man at 21, but his long-time followers are certainly no less so today and I guess I hadn't realized that.

Allison asked what other singer had achieved as lasting an effect and a response of "Michael Jackson" was all but shouted down.

To the devoted, Elvis is apparently the real thing and no one can be acknowledged in the same breath as the man.

Many of the people in the audience were following up the talk with seeing the show, but since I'd already seen it, I headed west for lunch.

I was meeting a friend in the restaurant business who's always eager to eat places he hasn't (and surprisingly, he hasn't eaten at a lot of places).

That's how I'd introduced him to Ettamae's and Stella's. Today it was Black Sheep, although I'd originally suggested Amuse.

It would have been terribly convenient for me, but he shot that down because he was coming in work clothes and wanted someplace he considered more casual.

Like everyone else, he was charmed by the place, ordering the Falldorf Salad, a creative take on a Waldorf salad with clementines in addition to the usual suspects, and a Diet Cheerwine.

Then there was me, the feminine one, whose delicate appetite demanded that I go to the opposite extreme with the Green Eggs and Lamb.

The eggs were baked with Derby Sage cheese and spinach and the two large links of lamb sausage gave me all the salty I could hope for to accompany the sweetness of my Abita Root Beer.

That would be sweet, as in sugary. Unlike several of my male friends, I disdain diet sodas.

Everyone decides which real things are important to them. Imagine hanging on to that devotion for fifty years.

I might not be in the Elvis fan club, but I'm hugely impressed by anyone who inspires long-lasting passion.

Just to be clear, though, I have no intention of wearing blue suede shoes to prove it.

Walking in Blue Suede Shoes

It's not like I was ever an Elvis fan.

By the time I got into music, he was old news.

As I got older, I grew to appreciate his seminal role in American music and became more enamored of his crucial role in cultural history than anything else.

Which makes the new show at the VMFA, "Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer," as good as an early Christmas present to me.

I met friends there today for the members' preview to see the large-format photographs of Elvis on the cusp of stardom.

The exhibit has photographs from 1956 when Wertheimer was given unlimited access to the up and coming young singer as he toured, recorded and gathered girls.

Best of all, several of the pictures were taken in Richmond when he did a two-night stand at the Mosque.

The series of pictures of him kissing a Richmond girl in the back hallways of the Mosque are provocatively intimate.

My favorite is the iconic one of them touching tongues before kissing, not because of that part but because of the way he has his hands on her waist, as if to secure her in his orbit.

There were photos of him in Broad Street Station when he arrived by train and was carrying his radio. The building's interior and trestles are instantly recognizable if you've been in the Science Museum much.

The photograph of the Jefferson Hotel luncheonette was endlessly fascinating to me.

First of all, I hadn't even known that there was such a thing in the grand hotel. Stacks of soup cans awaited lunchers along with signs touting sandwich specials like "Grilled cheese 20 cents" and "Smithfield ham 40 cents."

Secondly, the shot of Elvis and the same girl talking and eating at the lunch counter is notable for how unbothered they are by anyone. Just two kids having a date.

But it wasn't just the Richmond photos that caught my eye.

One of him on the Steve Allen show singing "Hound Dog" to an actual Basset Hound with a top hat was sweet, although less so when I learned that the point of using the dog was so that Elvis would sing to it and not be swiveling his hips.

Another of Elvis on the train with a portable record player on his lap shows him lost in listening to the music playing, no doubt his own recent recordings. His profile is incredibly young and beautiful.

After seeing the show, my friends and I went down to the Best Cafe for lunch and to talk about what we'd just seen.

As a huge fan of photography and cultural history, I will undoubtedly see the show again.

Getting to see glimpses of the man before the myth is tantalizing.

One picture showed Elvis reading fan mail with a pile of shredded letters nearby. It was his practice to tear them up once he'd read them. He felt that their contents were no one's business but his own.

True that, but how fortunate that the photographs are still very much ours to linger over.