Picture Day
I don’t know about you all, but high school yearbook photos might as well have been akin to costumes and dress up – too much make up, hair dye (Patricia much?), teenage fashion (which is a costume in and of itself) and a whole lot of tricks (how can the retake photo be worse then the original?) and treats (that rare high school photo you were actually happy with!)
You see kids, when Patricia and I were in high school, you would be herded into the auditorium, get ONE photo taken, and then have to wait two or three weeks to see the results.
Can. You. Imagine.
Nothing could make or break your day more than getting your photos back – you either crushed them to your chest so no one could see until you had a chance to bury them deep in your locker, or you “accidentally” left them face up on your desk all day.
Now, this is most definitely the female POV regarding picture day, and the ironic thing? My brothers Will and Ken couldn’t have cared less about it, if they remembered it all - and they had amazing pictures EVERY YEAR!
In their defence they didn’t get perm a month before grade nine picture day and burn a diamond-shaped area in their front hairline that made it look like they were growing a – as my friend Pauline dubbed it – “magical unicorn horn”. My attempted headband-fix was a valiant effort, but alas was no match for the unfortunate tuft peaking its way through.
But fear not, by grade twelve it had grown out of course – just in time to jump on the “Rachel” train.
Looking at yearbook photos of Patricia and I and our friends through the years I take away two things – how freaking young we look and, we don’t look even a quarter as bad as we thought we did then…
We look like you’re supposed to as teenagers – awkward, hopeful, excited, nervous, unsure – but sitting a little taller every year on that stool (that the photographer would have to rotate up and down between each student to navigate the myriad of growth spurts among the teenage student body.)
We didn’t have cell phones and certainly didn’t have selfies – the only photos taken of us in the halls of high school were by the yearbook photography students and the photographer on picture day.
Thank god.
(All the respect to teenagers today, I would never make it.)
And there was nothing better than your friend telling you they saw your picture hanging up in your crush’s locker, if you weren’t a couple yet, you were about to be!
If 1990s had sexting, that was it.
But the best part of wallet size school pictures was the back, because that is where you would write messages to each other before swapping pics – and all of a sudden the photo didn’t matter, because it was just a vehicle to tell your friends how much you loved them with a pen smudged inscription scrawled across the back.
School pictures in the ‘90s were (seemingly) stressful, (seemingly) unforgiving and (definitely) every millennial's worst nightmare…
NO FILTER.
And as much as I hated it then, I’m so grateful for that now.
Magical unicorn horn and all.
Love,
Grace
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