Dr. Seuss.

I thought of him when I saw this tree.

The tree looked like something from one of his books. Maybe a new book. One that was tucked away in a drawer and was lost. And, found.

The Cat in the Hat came to New Orleans and got fat. Why not? People come here and eat our food and gain ten pounds in a weekend. It’s not that our food is bad. It’s good. Too good. We serve big portions. They drip with good tasting stuff. Fattening stuff.

This post isn’t about our food. It’s about the tree. It’s about The Cat in the Hat. It’s about Theodor Seuss Geisel. Most of us grew up with him. We learned from him. And, I got to photograph him.

You never know how making pictures of famous people is going to go. Sometimes, you get five or ten minutes, making it impossible to actually get to know the subject.

Not the good doctor. I spent the better part of the morning with him. His wife made coffee and later, lunch. We talked. We laughed. He liked my way of working. No posing. Very few instructions. Mostly letting him be him.

The tree made me think of those strange, but cool, illustrations in his books. I tried to compress them a little to help you see what I saw. I did some post production and you are looking at the result.

There are a lot of Doctor Seuss quotes. More than I can remember. But, I remember this one.

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”