The weekend was richly romantic

"There's an Inuit myth about the origin of the human race," he said. "There were two brothers and the younger brother eventually gets changed into a woman. And that's how humans reproduced. And I thought, 'How could I really understand that?' "In the Tenderloin district, he was introduced to cross-dressers who offered to make him up. They cut an orange in half, he said, then took the orange and dried the orange peels, creating two breasts. "And a dress and a wig," he said. "It was very, very simple."But it sparked something. Later, he went to Japan and wrote what he called a "short book"about Noi theater dancers, cross-dresser clubs and Kabuki actors. He analyzed the "jewel-facets" of geishas in Kyoto - their "painted eyebrows and black-outline eyes, the vulvalike patch of unwhitened skin on the back of the neck.""I had always imagined femininity as what you're born with, what's between your legs," he said, "And then I realized: no, it's a performance. It's about how you move, all the things you do to get ready."He started buying dresses.

He even had a custom corset made for him. "Usually they lace up in the back,sex kitten cheap" he said. "But I'm so clumsy I had one made to lace up in the front." Eventually, he turned the camera on himself.By then, more than a decade had passed since the first time he dressed in drag. "I had aged,swimsuit cover up white" he said. " I looked like this horrible Elizabethan courtier.cheap bodystockings"Indeed, many of the images in "The Book of Dolores" have a garish sideshow quality: Dolores with whip and dog collar; Dolores with a noose around her neck; Dolores as a deranged clown. Some of the photographs were printed with an arcane 19th-century method called gum bichromate, which takes him 28 days to produce a single print. The results are shocking - a sense of shock that Mr. Vollmann cultivates. Sometimes he even scares himself. "I might stay in the studio in the dress and wig with the breastforms on for two or three days," he said, referring to his writing bunker, an abandoned-looking white building surrounded by barbed wire in downtown Sacramento. "I'm the only one who has a key to the place," he said. "I might not eat, I might just drink some booze,girls opening bras picsgirl comments thong and maybe around midnight I'm slowly walking down here in the middle of the night.