Somehow it happened twice. My grandmother and I were traveling solo, decided to visit a museum, and were confronted with a Cindy Sherman exhibit. Let me say first (are you listening, Cindy?) that I love Cindy Sherman. The first time I saw her untitled film stills, in high school, I spent months afterward trying to be as original as I possibly could in the way that only a 16-year-old can; I did everything she did, with infinitely less style and no imagination. But during the summer following that eye-opening year, I traveled with my grandma, and the film stills weren’t part of the exhibition we saw.

Some background on my grandma might be necessary here. She made most of the jewelry she wore by the time we were traveling; she took college courses in her 70’s and learned to make amazing silver jewelry. For her 75th birthday we bought her an acetylene blow torch so she could work at home, and she haggled over scraps of sterling with grad students less than a third of her age. She was fascinated by the process of making things, be it buildings, roads, writing utensils, and I never saw her cry at a movie.

Then she met Cindy’s Barbie collection, which, by the way, was absolutely nothing like mine. Limbs or head missing, legs spread, some in the process of being violated by strange objects, all of them grotesque and terrible and beautiful. I was in love. My grandmother was horrified.

“You never did that to your Barbies, did you?� She paused, considering. Her eyes traveled over the naked, sprawled, plastic bodies, trying with difficulty to imagine what I saw that was appealing.

The first time it happened I was 16, and we were in Tel Aviv.

The second time, we were in Chicago. In the intervening 5 years I had taken art history courses, studied film, and spent 4 years in the liberal arts program of a major university, which had, if nothing else, given me the ability to explain what other people meant.

For the rest of the afternoon, we wandered at an erratic pace from image to image, and this time, when she asked what I saw in Sherman’s pictures that was so appealing, I was able to tell her. Each person was a character, displaced from her story. Each Barbie, stripped of any identifying characteristics, was somehow still recognizably a Barbie. At 16 I had wondered what would be left of me without my love of art, my freckles, my endless string of after-school activities. I found something reassuring in the fact that Barbie was still identifiably Barbie.

Believe me, I still rejoiced in the subversive element, I wanted people to be aware of the objectification and commodification of the female body, but some part of me also was reminded of my teenage longing for recognition. The non-Barbie work we saw that day kept me thinking along the same lines; Cindy herself, adorned as a milk-spurting Madonna, sprawled on horribly patterned hotel beds, always looked completely different, but was still recognizably Cindy.

It’s easy to be drawn to art that locates its subject in space or time, paintings or photographs of recognizable, safe types of people doing safe, recognizable activities. That’s why hotels are filled with paintings of peasants ploughing fields, young girls playing the piano, couples in every century strolling arm in arm. But life doesn’t hand us nice pictures with no conflict.

My grandmother understood perfectly. Blind acceptance is comforting, but not particularly interesting. Anything initially disturbing is also fascinating if you take the time to look. And we looked and looked, and finally sat and argued, and she turned the tables on me; how had I not noticed the oddities, the garbage, the uncountable things that surrounded each body? Wasn’t the detritus of a life just as important in understanding? Weren’t the artifacts left behind often the key to understanding the past? How could I have been so focused on the bodies that I ignored the chatchkes?

I hadn’t ignored them, but I hadn’t thought to give them that importance. I think I was more surprised by my grandma teaching me something about Cindy Sherman than I was about the new understanding itself.

Grandma and I sat and talked for a long time, and part of my birthday gift later that year was a beautiful book of Cindy’s Untitled Film Stills, which I adored. I still love Cindy Sherman, but what I loved most was the chance to find out just how amazing my grandma really was.

Note: My Grandma Ruth’s second yartzheit is tomorrow night, the 14th of Adar. ת”× ”צ”ב”×”