Lorraine Collett

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a yard in the sun, a screen door, distant packing house)
Fresno, nineteen fifteen. A girl and a red bonnet.

[Verse 1]
She was drying her hair in the sun in her own back yard
with her mother's red bonnet in her hand and a tray of grapes,
and a man from the company happened to be passing,
and that is the entire origin. That's it. That's how it went.
No agency. No casting. No committee in a room.
A woman in a yard on an ordinary morning.

[Chorus]
Lorraine Collett. The bonnet was her mother's.
The grapes were on a tray because the grapes were being dried.
Nothing in the picture was invented or arranged —
they painted what was happening and put it on a box.
Lorraine Collett. She's still on the box.
That's her. That's an actual morning. That happened.

[Verse 2]
And she lived a long life, and she'd tell the story gladly,
and in her eighties she'd still go to the fairs and to the shows
and sit and sign the boxes, and people would come by,
and she'd say — yes, that's me, that's my mother's bonnet, that's my hair.
She died in nineteen eighty-three. She was ninety-one.
The girl in the picture was ninety-one years old.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And this one has no sting in it. I keep checking. There isn't one.
Nobody took her name. Nobody sued anybody.
She was paid, she was credited, she was proud, she was known,
she was pleased about it right up to the end.
Sometimes it just goes well. Sometimes a person
is on a box for a century and it's simply nice.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the yard, the sun, a screen door closing gently)
That's her hair.
That's her actual hair, drying in the sun.