I revel in awkward photographs. Except when I'm in them.
And I don't have to go further than the one at the top of today's post.
The children of one of my dad's cousins were cleaning out their drawers and found a bunch of pictures that they thought would be of interest to me. Most were.
Except the one at the top of today's post.
Okay, I'm maybe three or four. A cute red suit. A bowtie from the Bud Collyer collection. My overbite is still not in full Bugs Bunny mode. Adorable.
And I'm fully armed. James Bond of the pre-school set. Or perhaps one of the youngest members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, except I hadn't been kidnapped like Patty Hearst.
Maybe I should have been.
Back in those days, the annual photograph of Len was a huge production. My mom would drag me kicking and screaming down to Genung's where some old guy who smelled of nicotine and vodka would put me in some weird poses. One year, I was caressing a stuffed animal that was supposed to be Lassie. Another year, they had ditched the formal wear and dumped me into a striped shirt and some overalls. My homage to Dennis the Menace.
As a result of these photo ops, my mother would wind up with various options for distribution to relatives and friends. Table frame size. Wallet size. You name it. They were scattered all over the Bronx and Mount Vernon like cow manure in the spring.
I have most of these photos in storage back East. Except this one which showed up in the mail the other day.
A lifetime neurosis begins anew after a multi-decade dormancy.
I want to think about what happened that day at Genung's. What was the creative thought behind turning a four-year-old into Elliot Ness?
A drunk photographer? A given. But did my mother actually think this was a cute shot? And, since this went to one of my dad's cousins, Mom obviously had no qualms about sharing her little gunslinger with the world. And was this a deferred remorse over the staging of this photo? When I sifted through my mother's own memory drawer, I found about five years worth of Genung's photos. But not this one.
Was it just misplaced by accident?
Or lost on purpose? Yet, it was found buried deep in the memory drawer of another relative.
Obviously, at one point, it had a shelf life.s for the actual photo itself, it's going into another kind of drawer. The one with the T-shirts and the socks. The unmentionable being hidden by other unmentionables.
A most fitting burial.
Now when I was in my NY digs last week, I ran into a bunch of other photos. None of them as incendiary as the one above. But I did find my eighth-grade yearbook picture.
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