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fter your senior year of high school, you’d think you might be done with piling your fists on top of one another on top of a dirty white pillar with your head cocked to the side and smiling wide to show the world just how uncomfortable you can look in pictures. However, I found out this weekend that the awkwardness of commemorative photography continues beyond your high school yearbook.
I came home to find out that my mom had made an appointment for us to get a new family picture taken for my Grandmother’s Christmas present this year. I fantasized about us heading out into the Wisconsin countryside and renting a pure-bred golden retriever puppy to frolic around with while some gifted photographer snapped candid shots of us and then photoshopped them to make our bodies glow like we were radioactive. However, when we pulled up to a place in between a Chili’s and a Dollar Store in a strip mall, it was like someone kicked that puppy, kidnapped us from the countryside and threw us into the back of their ’83 GMC G Series van.
For some reason, this place smelled and felt like a doctor’s office to me. I was being put in positions I would never be in normally and I just wanted it be over as soon as I got there. I could feel my body recoiling and backing towards the door.
Let me paint the picture. My father, who is wearing shorts, a Reebok T-shirt and high socks with tennis shoes, straddles a white chair while my mother and I stand behind him with our hands placed awkwardly on top of each other on his shoulders. The same pose we assume at every family gathering of course, it just comes to us, you know? It’s just the kind of familiar pose that will bring a huge, natural, beaming smile to all of our faces, and it’s obvious these photographers know that.
Then of course, the photographer, who I can barely hear she speaks so softly, tells me she wants to take some of just me (oh great!). Move over Miley Cyrus on the cover of Vanity Fair, this is my moment. This woman hands me a giant purple flower and whispers, “This is going to be kind of like a glamour shot.” I flashback to when I was nine and my mom and I had our hair teased a yard away from our scalps, poured on blue eye shadow, wore matching studded leather jackets, sat back to back, and had hazy photos taken in the back of our friend’s beauty parlor, which, coincidently was also in a strip mall.
Although that flower glamour shot scarred my soul in ways I can’t describe, the picture actually looked nice. And then I fear I’m turning into my mother in thinking that in any way those pictures could look “nice” when my body was tense and angry every single moment I was in that portrait store. If you would have seen the glossy pictures of that four-year-old girl with a leather jacket on, standing next to a Harley you would have tried to run for your life too. I was actually really thankful there was a Dollar Store next to this place, because I needed a lot of seventy-nine-cent Peanut M&Ms to heal my soul after such lasting trauma.
After a day of awkward family shoulder touching, I headed home, drank half a bottle of wine, and dreamt of the day we could just buy my grandmother a nice embroidered crew-neck sweatshirt with a hummingbird on it like everyone else and avoid the pain.
Cardinal readers, I hope for your sake, you all got to run around a countryside somewhere with flocks and herds of the most pure golden-retriever puppies you could find this weekend without a camera or odd photography prop in sight.
Ever had your pic snapped in a strip mall? E-mail Jacklin at Jbolduan@wisc.edu and you two can compare the awkwardness.
