Sipping coffee with our babysitter as my kidlet gets down to the work of play, I hear my future — and a little bit of my past — playing on her answering machine.
“This is the school nurse. … It’s not an emergency, but I just want to let you know that your daughter’s in the office and will need to be picked up. … It seems she’s gotten a comb stuck in her hair and, well, we just can’t get it out. I think she’s going to need a hairdresser.”
It’s that time of year again: school pictures. The season when your intellect sits back and laughs while impulse takes over. Compelling you to try a curl in your poker-straight hair with a flimsy comb and some stiff gel.
It can make just about any kid go a little crazy.
Oh sure, my little ittybit doesn’t have enough hair to get caught in a barrette yet, let alone one of those flimsy combs handed out like business cards by traveling cameramen, but she comes from a long line of precocious dimwits who will try just about anything to get the right look. Even when the look is just wrong.
My husband, after all, ventured into the cold climes of Minnesota, transferring in his high school freshman year from the preppy northeast, wearing his ‘Miami Vice’ garb — an outfit so out of place among his heavy-metal, black t-shirted peers that he still hasn’t completely recovered. Nor, for that matter, has he been willing to get rid of the signature white blazer, which would undoubtedly produce an Incredible Hulk effect were he to try it on today.
When I was in kindergarten, my mother tells me, I stood at her dresser mirror for nearly an hour practicing my smile.
As strange as that may have seemed to her, I knew exactly how I wanted to look for my first school photograph. Dressed in my favorite brown plaid jumper, hair parted on the side, I practiced my “sweet” smile until I knew it by rote.
After all, I didn’t want to be caught off guard, letting my mischievous grin or my crooked smirk to accidentally creep into the frame.
Of course, I didn’t take into account the possibility that the pictures would come back mid blink.
Suffice it to say the next 12 photos sessions did nothing to graduate my styling abilities. … My dos were all don’ts — a self-styled shag haircut, the Dorothy Hammel, the Farrah Fawcett, a bad perm (thank-you Flash Dance) — and I committed every fashion faux pas one can imagine, from acid-wash jeans to camouflage coveralls.
It’s inevitable. The idea of having an image that will hang around to haunt you for years to come is temptation enough to put on your best face even if it’s not really yours.
I can’t imagine what my sugar pie’s penchant for fashion misfortunes will be as I watch her playing with blocks on the floor, but I know she’s got some stiff competition.
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