pink...tulip

So... among other things, we were talking in class about images of vegetables or vegetation (c.f. Weston's shiny peppers, of course, and Robert Mapplethorpe's "Calla Lily") that are very sexualized, and talking about how, and why, we might read them in such terms.   What I wanted to do was to take a picture that would, if possible, suggest the fleshly and physical *without* necessarily being sexual.   The end result, of course, courtesy of a pink and white tulip, is more reminiscent of a rather lazily proliferating collection of random cells than anything else - or perhaps of a dental image gone very wrong: lots of infolding teeth in foliating gums.   Which started me thinking: maybe my apprehension about dentists goes back to when I was around six-and-a-half, and I didn't realize (a) that one lost one's baby teeth, and got another set, and (b) that this was what was happening when I started to grow another set of bottom front teeth behind the ones I already possessed.   In fact, I thought I was turning into a dragon (what else would have a double row of fangs?), and kept looking down my throat to see if I was growing flames.   It never occurred to me to check things out with my mother.