Cheese

Today was the moment of the school year that, in my youth, I would await with a mixture of dread and unrequited optimism that this year would maybe…just maybe be better than last year. Today was Year Book Picture Day. While I magically learned the trick of smiling on request in college (though keeping my eyes open still eludes me), my primary and secondary education years are well documented with terror-stricken cringes in elementary, looks of surprised confusion in middle school, questionable fashion choices in junior high, and unsuccessful attempts at coy poses in high school that just made me appear inflected with an incurable malady.

The photos that many hope are among the boxes ruined in a basement flood are the pictures from that “Awkward Phase”. At twelve and thirteen years old, kids experiment with their own grooming, and the accompanying photos are usually those pictures mostly likely to end up torched in the campfire of poor adolescent decisions.

My students’ attempts at personal hygiene impact me every day. As I walk down the aisles, I hit pockets of perfume and cologne that knock me back a step and I am left to wonder if the student recently fumigated his apartment with Axel Body Spray. The make-up dry-runs would provide amazing inspiration for any Hollywood zombie fest make-up artist.

The typical lapses in their English education in favor of puckering in poorly concealed mirrors were thrown into hyper-drive because of picture day. As the moments dwindled before their turn to go in front of the photographer, I found myself having to quell a primping mutiny. It started with a few mirrors hastily stuffed back into secret compartments within their book bags or pencil cases whenever I glanced at the offending student. Next, the brushes came out of hiding. When I told one girl to put the brush away, she protested and said, “But it’s picture day! Two more seconds.”

She yanked that brush through her already detangled hair at hummingbird speed. The girl only really accomplished a look that suggests she just touched the static ball at a science museum.

Before too long, enough beauty products came out of undetectable crevices that I thought my students collectively robbed the Avon store down the street. One student had a vat-sized hairspray bottle large enough to keep Miss American contestants pacified until the Talent Show portion of the competition. I had to confiscate three mirrors…from the same boy.

I actually pardoned one boy’s mirror obsession because he was near meltdown stage after a girl accused him of wearing eyeliner. He frantically explained that the gallon of hairspray he used was leeching the black dye out of his hair, which drifts across his eyes, and giving him the unintentional Emo appearance.

At that exchange, I resorted to the old teacher trick of turning towards the board so the students couldn’t see me chuckling. I actually DID think he was wearing eyeliner, but since many of the students have adapted Flock of Seagull and other 80s hairstyles, I thought male make-up was just par for the course.

Moments before the bell rang when I had given up all semblance of returning my students to their lesson on myths, I tried to reassure one of the most frazzled girls that the Year Book Picture wasn’t that important, but she countered me quite thoroughly. “Yes it is! I don’t want people looking at my picture and say, ‘Wow, she’s ugly’, and I know they do because that’s what I say about other people!”

Well…that’s a different lesson entirely.