Janey gave me a flyer about her showcase and we hugged good-bye. She had to make a workout class at Barry’s Boot Camp in Sherman Oaks. I guess that explained her newly svelte figure. I tossed the flyer in the trash with my stale coffee cup on the way out.

When I got home, I did a search of Jack’s name online. I wanted to see what he was “writing.” I still found the idea of him holding down a steady job hard to grasp. I finally came across some documentary where he was listed as a “creative consultant.” I took that title to mean that he’d helped out on the project but had not been paid.

Googling Jack’s name brought me to a photo diary he kept on Flickr. I’d never checked out Flickr before. Millions of registered users used the online photo site to show and share photos. Jack had been keeping a photo diary since the birth of his first little boy. With just a few clicks of the mouse I could view pictures Jack had taken in the past ten years. Baby pictures of his kids, a nude shot of his eight-months pregnant wife artfully done in silhouette. (C’mon, does anyone really want to see that?) There were Christmas pictures from last year with a large fake tree in their living room. I could just make out the couch next to the tree in one of the photos. It was the couch Jack’s mom had given us when we moved in together. How was that even possible? How could he even have the same couch after all these years?

Besides the pictures of his kids and home life, Jack had devoted a large folder of pictures to his old band. I guess they’d never gotten signed. He’d scanned ticket stubs from big shows at the Roxy and the Palladium, displaying them next to grainy photos of the band performing onstage. I remembered the shirt he had to wear for every show. Jack had bought it at a store on Melrose back when shopping on Melrose was cool.

I was still bothered by the fact that he still had the couch eight years and one wife later when I saw another familiar face from the past: my face. Or as my mother would say, my old nose featured on my old face. Along with the concert pictures, Jack had scanned photos of a party backstage. Did that guy ever lose a roll of film? I didn’t even remember this shot, but there I was, with my big hair, big nose, and very little skirt. That part of the ’90s wasn’t good for fashion.

Written in the margin of the picture was the caption, “Miss 1998, talk about a Miss-Take!” with a bold arrow pointing directly at my old nose.