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My Aunt
Glenda has this crazy deal where she doesn't like to have her picture
made. She is pretty sly and crafty, because what she has figured out is
that if she is always walking around WITH a camera in her hand, she
won't be the subject of the photos. If we ever do catch her in front of
the lens, she will whip off her glasses with such lightening force that
the wind from the movement ruffles all of our hair. Inevitably, she
won't be pleased with the result. "Is
that what I look like?" She'll comment, upon viewing the final
result. "That's AWFUL!" Bear in mind that my aunt is not a
hideous beast of a woman. She is a slender, red-headed woman who, it's
true, can take the occasional bad photo, but no worse, certainly than
the rest of us. "Remember
that time," I said to her, when she was fussing about how bad a
picture looked. "When I was in sixth grade and I accidentally
plucked all my eyebrows out?" (Okay. So it wasn't an
"accident"- I was experimenting with tweezers and a more
groomed look than my sixth grade woolly mammoth eyebrows and got carried
away to the point of no return.) "Or how about," I continued,
"All the FAT pictures of me?" For the first, oh, five or so
years after giving birth to any one of my sons, I would carry the bulk
of the weight around with me as an unwelcome souvenir of gaining way
past the recommended weight during my pregnancies. The "fat"
photos are a solid testimony to the dangers of the Ho-Ho and Dr. Pepper
pregnancy. She
doesn't see it. She thinks our "bad" pictures are nothing in
the big scheme of things- nothing compared to her bad photos. So let
me just state right here that I have never been one to run from the
camera. Not even when forty or so more pounds of me was spilling out of
my size fourteen jeans- what can I say; I am a ham. An oldest child, I
was photographed, A LOT, as a child and I guess I grew to like it. But I
do, however, despise, that newfangled contraption, the dreaded, the
dratted, VIDEO CAMERA. We have tons of videos of our three boys; taken
at various stages of their lives. Like my aunt, I have learned that if I
am behind the camera, then I am not in FRONT of it, and that suits me
just fine. Because even listening to my voice, laughing and commenting
on the tape, sets my nerves on fire. My
oldest son has decided that on our upcoming trip to the Grand Canyon, he
is going to make a video-topography. Or something like that. In essence,
he is going to document every aspect of our trip, from the preparations
to the flight, to the intimate moments at the hotel on video. "No
film of me in my hair curlers." I warned him. I had visions of this
thing turning into an Osborne-esque affair, and I was not happy about
it. "Good
idea!" He laughed. "Mom in the curlers! I can't wait to get
THAT on film." My Aunt
Glenda never had it so bad. At least in her photos, she was fully
dressed, hair combed and presentable. My son had gleeful plans to
capture me and the rest of the family at our horrible, early morning
worst and then to showcase the film to his friends. "I
am warning you!" I shouted, sounding suspiciously like my aunt.
"You cannot take footage of me unless I am ready." And then,
mumbling under my breath, "Which I will never be." "MOM!"
He replied, exasperated, "It is a documentary of our trip. It has
to have ALL the moments; the good and beautiful ones along with the
horrible reality of you in your curlers." Lovely.
I knew that when I first saw that boy creeping around the corner in the
hotel room with his camcorder; myself with a full head of curlers, that
I'd start whipping those suckers out so fast that my family would think
they had landed in the middle of a war zone- the curlers shooting out
like bullets from my head. Maybe
the deal with my aunt is not so crazy after all. Maybe some things, like
glasses wearing and a big fat head full of electric hotrollers, are
sacred and never meant to be captured on film. |
