Last week I told my mother, who is a total sweetie, that I might soon be working on a project for which I will need some pictures of a certain Dallas neighborhood. I'd post a google image here, except that's the problem: there really aren't any.

I mentioned to her that some time in the future I might need to arrange to have someone photograph some parts of the neighborhood, and the next thing I know, my mom has hopped in her little Beetle, grabbed a disposable camera, taken a roll of pictures, and expressed them to me overnight. Go mom.

I didn't think the images would be of exactly the quality we would need, but I thought they might be helpful for our writer to look at anyway, so I went ahead and got two copies. As it turned out, my mom took every single shot out of her car window, so the sides of each picture are bordered by her sideview mirror and the window frame and so on. Like I said, I was thinking the writer would use these pictures more for reference than anything else, but at the same time, about five shots into the roll I found myself yelling "Get out of the car, Mom! Out of the car!" at the pictures.

Not that I blame her. It isn't the best of neighborhoods, and I would have felt terrible if something bad happened to her just because she was trying to help me out after I made an offhand remark about needing these pictures.

The thing is that a friend and I had an adventure about ten years ago in this neighborhood while doing a similar project. She needed to do a presentation for her Latin class, so she decided to do it on Roman and Greek architecture in Dallas. She invited me along because I had taken Aesthetics and could throw around words like 'Doric' and 'entablature'. That and I had a video camera.

So there we were, on a bright and sunny Saturday afternoon, driving around this slightly depressed neighborhood, two bourgeois girls in a van taping the buildings. We had a sketchpad that we would draw diagrams on to help illustrate the features we were pointing out on each of the buildings. The buildings themselves were quite nice, composition-wise, with many decorative touches and flourishes. Maintenance-wise, they could use a little work.

Finally we ended up in front of a church (you would think that would be safe, especially at 3:00 on a Saturday), and my friend crossed the street to stand in front of it, while I was filming her. Suddenly this scruffy guy loomed up behind her and started asking us what we were doing.

"Are you the news? You're the news, aren't you? I'm on the news!" he hollered, brandishing this paper bag that could have held anything from a wino bottle to a gun. As it turned out, it was only a McDonald's salad, which he pulled out a moment later and began extoling the virtues of for the benefit of our 'news cast'.

Then this other even more hobo-like guy with a dog came over, and he was approaching us a bit more threateningly. I had crossed the street to be nearer to my friend, and now we were both sort of backing away. Salad man started pushing at hobo-guy to get him to back off, and we started quick-walking back to the van.

I didn't stop taping, so we got some lovely footage of the ground skimming by as we jogged away.

We went the long way around the church to where we parked, rather than have to pass by hobo-guy. By the time we were safely belted in our seats, and had managed to exhale a sigh of relief, we were beginning to think we had overestimated the amount of danger we had been in.

And then scary hobo-guy rounded the corner and started heading towards us, mangy dog in tow.

So we screeched off, enough adrenalin pumping through our nerves to keep us shaking until well into the evening. You can hear our voices quivering in the narration for the rest of the tape.

For a finale, we went to the nicest* most chi-chi part of Dallas (the one whose police force uses 'you are Mexican' as a reason for pulling motorists over) and filmed some neo-Grecian mansions. And, I'm sure, freaked those people out as much as Salad-man freaked us out. It's all relative, after all.

The best part about the whole thing is that the church was catticorner to a 7-11, and not thirty seconds before we left the safety of our van, a police cruiser had been parked in front of the 7-11 (getting donuts, I'm sure). So that was our moral at the end of the tape, and the key point of our guide to Roman and Greek architecture in Dallas: "Never get out of the car to film if you are in a bad part of town, inhabited by crazy guys and scary dogs, and the policeman has just left.�

* By 'nicest' I mean 'most ostentatious and money-bloated'.