Ricki Lake was in bed on Monday night, watching Bravo and feeling the buzz from a weed gummy when a friend texted her a screenshot of a social media post that said, “Anybody know how to contact Ricki Lake?”
The person looking for Ms. Lake was Patty Scanlon, an actor and painter, who included family photos of Ms. Lake from the 1990s with her query.
Ms. Scanlon had made the post shortly after a trip on Sunday to the Pasadena City College Flea Market, where she bought a box of photos for $20 in the hopes of finding artistic inspiration. What she found instead were copies of family photos that Ms. Lake had lost when her house in Malibu was destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires in January.
“It does feel like finding treasure,” Ms. Lake said in a phone interview, “this unboxing of stuff that I just never expected to see again.”
Ms. Scanlon said she often looked at old photographs to find subjects to paint. When she was riffling through the dusty photos on Sunday, she was moved by a stranger’s face. It was Ms. Lake’s.
“There’s this beautiful black-and-white photo of this woman, and I look at her and I think, ‘Ooh, that’s the kind of face I like to paint,’” Ms. Scanlon said.
She put that photo, and others of the woman, in her “keep” pile, while discarding photos of casinos and fountains in Las Vegas. As the “keep” pile grew, Ms. Scanlon said, she looked at the woman more closely and thought, “I think I know her?”
All of a sudden, she said, she realized it was Ricki Lake. (Her hunch was confirmed when she found a letter written on stationery with Ms. Lake’s name in the header.)
Ms. Lake hosted a syndicated talk show bearing her name in the 1990s and early 2000s, and starred in a number of John Waters’s films, including “Hairspray.” Ms. Scanlon searched online to see if the pictures could be Ms. Lake’s and was struck when she saw that Ms. Lake’s home had burned down.
Worried that they could be the only copies of the photos left because of the fires, Ms. Scanlon immediately posted on social media to see if anyone could put her in contact with Ms. Lake.
It turned out that Ms. Scanlon, who has acted in television shows including “Better Things,” shared many mutual friends with Ms. Lake, who now lives in New York.
Ms. Scanlon said the photos had been mailed in a box, and were expected to arrive at Ms. Lake’s home early next week.
Among the snapshots that Ms. Scanlon shared on social media is one of Ms. Lake and her son Milo, who is now 28, in matching bright yellow raincoats. Ms. Lake is excited to see what else is hiding in the collection. “I really feel like it’s going to be like Christmas coming early,” she said.
Ms. Lake said the photos appeared to have originally been sent to someone in her first husband’s family, but she’s not sure how they ended up at a flea market. “I’m still trying to piece it all together,” she said.
While Ms. Scanlon won’t be painting from the photos, she said she got something even better. “I feel like I have a new friend now,” she said.
And instead of painting a portrait of a stranger, Ms. Scanlon is planning to do a portrait of Ms. Lake in person, when they meet next year in New York or Los Angeles.
Amanda Holpuch covers breaking news and other topics.
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