Oh, to be sweet eighteen again -- or at least, eighteen again...
Project "Unearth Old Photos" continues. This one didn't require too much restoration but I did have to balance the color on that sweet back-drop that appears in every single posed photograph of me from 1992 on. My dad was a photographer, and liked to hang up cheeseball backgrounds for portraits. My friends were good sports about posing, though. Probably better sports than I.
One of the downsides of growing up in the house of a photographer is the sheer volume of pictures in existence. Nowadays they can be stored on a hard drive. But I've got cases and cases of photos from the day I was born until this past Christmas, capturing every bad haircut, every angst-laden adolescent dance, every birthday.
My older sister had it harder than I. In her tender youth, my parents were still in the habit of commemorating dates by dragging boys into the house for a photo session (complete with back-drop). Stopping that routine probably has more to do with my choice of dates than a waning interest in visual documentation; they were mostly afraid of the people I hung out with.
One truly surreal afternoon, at the bidding of my mother who was hurt that "you never bring your friends back here anymore," I invited the crew back to my sleepy suburban acre. My mom served piping hot brownies to my boyfriend at the time, Chris, a 6'5" punk kid with flaming orange hair and a black leather jacket with saw blades sewn into the shoulders. She asked us if we'd like to go for a swim. Bill, who had painstakingly spent several hours the previous night perfecting his cerulean blue hair, replied that he'd skip the pool since the chlorine might turn his hair "funny colors."
Notice the lack of prom date in the above photograph. He was probably hiding in the garage, wearing those patchwork pants of his and biting his painted black nails.
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