Karen’s Expressiveness
I’ll never have a chance to know Karen as a person, but I’ve always sensed, from the expressiveness of her photos, the candor of her interviews, and her success as an artist, that she’s a person who feels things deeply and wears her heart on her sleeve. I don’t think she could suppress her warmth, her enthusiasm, her passion, or her sensuality if she tried, and I wouldn’t want her to try, because it’s a joy to see her feelings bubble up, and to feel the joy they bring her and her fans. It’s not hard to imagine why Karen bruised so easily during her two-year stint as a PM—her openness and accessibility left her vulnerable, and she takes things to heart. A lot of what she had to deal with was unpleasant—something I’ll always feel guilty about as a fan, since it caused her great pain and worried her at times that she was becoming an altogether different person than she wanted to be, “hard,” as she put it. But what made it hard for her to be a PM is what made her an extraordinary PM. Her ability to connect with us emotionally, whether she performs an acrobatic feat or poses for a picture, is the key to her power. She’s not just beautiful and athletic. She’s captivating, because she can communicate her feelings with a simple gesture or a subtle change in her smile, and draw us to her.
I can’t get enough of Karen having fun. Her smile is so genuine, her body language so eloquent, that we feel her warmth right through the camera.
But I love her other expressions too, whether she’s welcoming,
Inviting (a promise of things to come!),
Enticing,
Bold,
or Passionate.
Karen’s face and body work in harmony in every shot to express and reveal her feelings. Intelligent and articulate as Karen is, she doesn’t need words to speak to us. Her emotionality and physicality—the keys to her artistry as a gymnast and acrobat—say it all. Karen may never feel she made the right choice to be a PM, but no one has ever been more right for the part.