Boy Reads to a Lion

In the early 1970s, a boy was asked to be in a photo advertisement for National Air Conditioners. It was staged in a living room on a plush carpet with an actual lion, trained to be friendly among humans. The boy snuggled up to this lion while reading a book. One of the souvenirs the boy received from that experience was a poster-sized photograph of the image used in the magazine advertisements. It is framed and now hangs in his son's bedroom all these decades later. I married the man who posed in that photograph with the lion, and when people look at the framed poster in my son's bedroom, they think at first that he is the one in the photo, not my husband as a child. My creation here was inspired by my husband, my son, and the photograph that hangs on my son's bedroom wall. True story.