Last week our "friend" Carolyn Stone found this picture somewhere in a dusty old box full of spiders and gum wrappers and posted it on Facebook where four million people were able to view it. Sometimes you can't control who sees what online, and let this be a cautionary tale to you all. Someday you youngin's will probably experience someone posting your twenty year old wedding invitation photo online, and I promise you won't think of yourself as hot or attractive as you did when you took that picture.
Actually, I didn't think this was a good picture of me even then. But Lisa and I had to take a photo for our wedding invites and this was the best one we got. You have to remember that there was a time, in the early 90's, where wedding invitations didn't look like pottery barn catalogues and you didn't really get to include twelve pictures of you and your fiancee laughing and walking down an aisle of fruit trees. You put on your church clothes, went to a "portrait studio," and smiled into a bunch of lights.
Lisa made the appointment for this photo, and to this day she regrets making the appointment at 7:30 in the morning (I swear.) For some reason I showed up late, and had been awake for about 30 minutes. I had not showered. I did a really half-hearted shave and did what I could with the wispy feathers I had for hair. For some other reason, I had a split lip. Maybe I was in some kind of grungy college fistfight? I don't remember. But I had a split lip, and there was no hiding it. This was a time before photoshop, before you could take "cute" wedding photos of you and your lover running from dinosaurs.
Speaking of hiding things, at this epoch in my life I was wearing braces. From an orthodontic standpoint I was truly a late bloomer. But at that time we were given an option of something called "clear braces" which meant that your braces would be invisible and nobody would see them! I opted in. Too bad that they weren't clear at all and basically just made your teeth look yellow. These braces fooled nobody, so you learned to talk through a small wedge of mouth. You hid the braces nicely that way, although your articulators had to work overtime if you wanted to sing in the singles ward choir! It was hard, you guys. When it came time to smile for this photo, I did what I could to hide my candy corn teeth, retaining the tightest and most strained grimace in all the land.
I still don't think this picture is that bad, though. Even though we look 12. It would have probably turned out better if I had been awake and tried a little harder. Our friend Jjana claimed that this was a terrible picture even back then, and accused Lisa of looking like a relief society president. I think she looks pretty. Her hair is super coiffed and she has dark lips and eyebrows, just like Lea Thompson in Caroline in the City. But is it weird to say that, now in our forties, we both look way better? Or is the mind just playing tricks? Will I someday look at pictures from 2014 and be embarrassed at how I look now? Or remember what it was like to be bald? In the future they will cure baldness, by the way.
