Say "Cheese!"

saraeschultz
Nov 15, 2014
3 min read

In elementary school, I always did school photo retakes. Always. Every single year.

Picture day was a great day of stress for me. Leading up to it, I would practice my smile for hours in my bathroom mirror. It never looked right. My mom and dad would gently critique "don't curl your lip up quite so much" or "your eyes aren't smiling" to ensure I looked like I was truly happy to be attending school and I actually wanted to commemorate the greatness that was my elementary education.

Picture day came and I would stand in line with the other kids, probably alphabetically and not by any of my friends for assistance in ensuring I successfully executed my shot, talking about who got the background color upgrade that year. "Maria got teal?! Ugh, I begged my mom for blue. The purple is nice too. Is there a pink option?" and anxiously waited for my turn in the hot, loud gym-turned-photo studio.

Inevitably, the photographer’s assistant would hand me a little comb and coax me to run it through my hair. Why on earth anyone would tell a poor, impressionable little girl with impossibly thick and curly hair to bring a fine-tooth comb to it was beyond me. It took 11 years of retakes to realize I needed to politely say "no thanks" to the comb and just forge ahead as is. The pain and agony those comb-happy bitches caused!

Anyway, I would do my best, sit up straight, smile my biggest but not-too-big, real but not-so-real-my-eyes-got-squinty, sincere but not-that-sincere-or-else-my-upper-lip-curled-too-much smile and hoped for the best…

And then I went to retakes. I wonder where those "reject" photos are. If I was the photographer, I would have made a little album of all the rejected little faces that failed their first photo op and laugh at them on a bad day as my secret guilty pleasure. I'm sure there were some phenomenal shots. I bet that could be the new "awkward family photo” movement. Don't steal my idea. I'm working on copyrighting now.

If my kids have retakes, I'm saving a copy of the original as blackmail for the future.

Something happened in high school and I finally figured it out (well, kind of but not really, because I was dying my hair blond and although my smile seemed to have improved the other 89% of the photo looked like an awful accident) and I was actually honored an award for best smile! Me? Best smile? It was a turning point in my smiling career and I would like to thank the Academy (of the JV dance team) for giving me the opportunity, and my parents, and God...

My point is, I got better! After years of stress and dread I got better at smiling on cue. Just in time for digital photography to allow me to immediately delete any crappy photo. Reflecting on this now makes me feel like I wasted years of training for nothing.

Of course, I had to re-do my senior photos (partially due to the mono I was fighting at the time that "made my eyes look dead" and because of the heinous haircut I thought was incredibly amazing). Which makes me feel like my training was even less worth it.

So, why am I sharing this? Because I have found my new school photo: visa/passport photos. You can't smile. You can't smirk. You can't have your hair look nice. And if you do, you can't enter the country. What?! So I'm SUPPOSED to look like a terrorist? I already have genes working against me on this front, and now I have to convince a country to let me in looking like this: