I do not like having my picture taken. Yeah, yeah, everyone says that, and everyone groans when they see pictures of themselves – “Like, could I look any fatter?” and “Okay, they keep talking about an oil shortage, but they obviously haven’t seen my face lately,” that kind of thing – but I can honestly say that I do not photograph well, and I never have. In the first pictures taken of me as a newborn, I look like an oversized, partially digested tadpole with a bad case of sunburn and a toaster for a head; my parents hold me in their laps and stare down at me with frozen smiles of dismay while my grandmother leafs through the baby book looking for a name that means “lumpen blob” in Welsh. Matters did not improve much in my early childhood; in my Sears baby portraits, I worked the giant-muffin-with-arms look, and then my parents, apparently in an effort to snag the prize money in some sort of Scariest Two-Year-Old In New Jersey contest, took a series of photos of me in all my just-bathed, stark-naked, Gorgon-headed toddler glory.

Eventually, I grew into my head and started to look like a normal little kid, but my class photos from elementary school don’t bear out this contention. The announcement of class-photo day – and the attendant passing out of announcement sheets that we had to bring home to our parents – inevitably prompted a groan from the entire class, even though having class photos taken disrupted the whole day and granted us a reprieve from various detested lessons. Our mothers made us wear scratchy new party dresses on class-photo day – all day. And tight, stiff patent leather Mary Janes – all day. My mother let me do what I liked with my hair, thank God, but a lot of girls came to school with their hair braided so tightly that they couldn’t close their eyes all the way. We wriggled itchily at our desks, big toes throbbing, and looked forward to lunch, when we could claw at the lace trim on our sleeves as feverishly as we wanted without Mrs. Stropp shouting at us to knock it off with the fidgeting, but at lunch, we had to eat so gingerly to avoid spilling that it took all the fun out of lunch, and then recess consisted of standing motionless on the sidewalk next to the playground, because we couldn’t run around and get our dresses all sweaty or get dust on our shiny shoes.

We could have lived with the discomfort, though, if we hadn’t had to face off against Peter Wallberg. Peter Wallberg handled the class photos for our school; Peter Wallberg froze our little hearts with dread. A gruff German with watered hair who smelled like a hospital ward, Peter Wallberg manhandled us into formation, plunking the short girls into a row of chairs according to hair color and barking out a series of incomprehensible orders to the taller girls, forcing us to do a line dance in the back row, and we tried to stand just so and hurry into place so that he wouldn’t come over to us and start pushing us to and fro, because we didn’t want him to touch us, and we’d freeze in our tracks when he called out impatiently, “The girl with the hair, to the left, please! Left, please! Three quarters! And now the girl with the dress, to the right, please!” and we had no damn idea who he meant, so we all scrambled to the left and to the right and turned three quarters in one direction or another, but we could never satisfy him, and he’d come lumbering over, sucking loudly on a cough drop that smelled like paint thinner, and herd us into a flying wedge that existed solely in his imagination, and we’d all smack together like little lacy dominoes, and he’d straighten out our collars and smooth hairs back into place while we stood stiffly and prayed for him to go back behind the camera already, and then he hassled the girls in the front row about the way they’d chosen to fold their hands, and he’d unlace their fingers and rearrange them while we continued to stand, not breathing, not wanting to move or muss ourselves lest he return to the back row for more fine-tuning. Peter Wallberg had grand ideas for the composition of the seemingly humble class photograph, you see, and woe the girl who interfered with the practice of his craft. Even them teachers disliked him; we could see them steeling themselves as he fussed over their brooches and tweaked their pleats. At long last, he would retreat behind the camera and impenetrably encourage us to “smile” and “everybody say kerflugenschnittel,” and we’d force out the nervous laugh of the kidnapping victim, and he’d click away, and he’d come out and appraise us, and he’d take a step towards us as if he meant to disport us in a new way entirely and we’d all flinch backwards as a group, and then he’d change his mind and decide that the shots he’d just taken would do and we could move on to the individual portraits, which we loathed even more because we had to spend one-on-one time with Peter Wallberg and his legendary comb, which had given the entire fourth grade head lice a few years before, and because Peter Wallberg’s flights of portraiture fantasy usually involved uncomfortably close encounters with elements of nature. “Please lean closer to the tree, little girl. Closer, closer, closer!” “But I have bark in my -” “CLOSER!” “O-o-okay.” Peter Wallberg’s favored Study In Annoyed Little Girl involved leaning us jauntily against a tree, preferably a tree with abrasive bark and gnarly roots on which we could barely stand, with our arms crossed in the Wallbergian style, which meant fingers on top of the arms and thumbs tucked under and elbows “down. Down, down, down! Look natural! Natural! Great! Closer to the tree now, but naturally!” as if we went around leaning against trees in martial arts poses in our daily lives, and he’d usually manage to face us directly into the sun for that oh-so-attractive squinty look, and as a result, in all of my grade-school class portraits, I look like the Simon character from Go when his friends let him out of the trunk of the car, i.e. nauseated and blind, except for the year that Peter Wallberg decided to pose us with flowers instead of trees, at which time he unceremoniously stuffed us one after the other into a stand of forsythia and commanded us to act natural: “Now, hold up the branch beside the face, little girl. Up. Up, up, up!” “But I have a leaf up my -” “UP!” “O-o-okay.” “Now, smile at the branch! Natural! Natural smiling!”

We had a brief respite from Peter Wallberg in high school, until just before senior year, when we had to sit for our senior yearbook portraits. Several weeks beforehand, we received a sheaf of instructions in the mail which advised us on how to optimize our senior-portrait experience. No white. No black. No big earrings. No plunging necklines. On the appointed day, I arrived at his backyard studio, which contained all manner of twee “settings” for portraits, and I acted natural in a gigantic wicker chair that I swear once doubled as an iron maiden, and I acted natural while peeping through the spokes of a huge wagon wheel, and I acted natural while seated at an angle of exactly fifty-two degrees on a retaining wall that didn’t even retain anything, and I acted natural while leaning jauntily on a tree, and I acted natural while lying full-length on wet grass, chin propped in hands, teeth drying out from the effort, and after all that natural acting, Peter Wallberg lost the goddamn negatives of the goddamn portraits and I had to go back to Wagon Wheel World for another round of Method posing.

A week later, I got the proofs in the mail, and the whole family had a good guffaw at my expense. “She doesn’t look so bad in this one.” “Yeah, she does. She looks like she smells something bad.” “I did smell something bad. I think he made me lie down in dog poo.” “How about this one, with the wheel? That one’s not terrible.” “Mom, she looks retarded in that one.” “Not that one with the wheel, the other one.” “Oh, that one. Wait, the one where she looks like she ate a bug?” “I did eat a bug! He made me pretend to laugh. Naturally. And a bug flew in my mouth. And thanks for totally not saying that I don’t look retarded, Ma.” “Well, you know I don’t like the word ‘retarded,’ but you do look a little slow in that picture.” “How’d he get your eyelid to flap like that?” “I had a bug in my eye.” “How did you get a bug in your eye?” “You’re asking me? He whapped my head into a tree, I had a concussion, I don’t know what happened.” “All right, now you’re exaggerating.” “No, I’m not, actually, but whatever.” “That one’s not so bad. But this one is terrible. What happened to your head here?” “Dad! God!” “What? You think I’m happy? I have to pay for these, and on top of that you’ve got a – something with your head!” “You don’t have to pay for them if I don’t use them for yearbook, and I am not using them for yearbook. Look at that – I don’t even have lips in half of these.” “Yeah, where are your lips?” “They’re sticking to my teeth, I think. And there’s the thing. With my head.” “The head thing is a problem.” “I still don’t get the eyelid thing. It’s like – you know that part of the Twilight Zone movie, with John Lithgow’s eyeball and it gets really big?” “Thanks. Thank you all so much.” “Well, Sar, you look bad. It’s not your fault or anything.” “Yeah, okay. Thanks.”

I got a neighbor to take my picture for the yearbook. It came out fine. I look like a spokesmodel for toothpaste, but at least I only have one chin (and no, you know, thing with my head, and I have lips and whatnot). Not so most other pictures taken of me, in which I look like one or all of the following things: 1) fat; 2) crazy; 3) really fat; 4) a man; 5) dumpy; 6) five years old; 7) drunk; 8) drunk on fat; 9) crazy drunk; or 10) a drunk man. Or I have my mouth open. Or I have my eyes closed. Or I have a – something with my head. Or no lips. It’s not that I think I’m ugly; I just don’t take very good pictures. And I have this habit of grinning maniacally or clowning around instead of just sitting quietly and keeping my chin up, and it doesn’t make for terribly flattering photos. Maybe other people take good pictures of me; my camera has nothing but nerd. The pics I’ve scattered throughout this column don’t even give you the first idea of the chinnage going on most of the time, but my scanner broke. Seriously, it did – I put in a blurry picture of myself with wine blush and eight chins, wearing pigtails, and it gave up the ghost. Maybe next week I’ll put those up. Yeah, next week.

Let the cavalcade of fugliness begin:

Hostile and greasy: a deadly combination.

This charming snapshot actually represents how I look most of the time pretty accurately. Well, except for my eyebrows, which actually look somewhat tamed here.

And now, a couple of entries from “The College Years: When All The Drinking And Midnight Runs To ‘Hoagie Haven’ Caught Up With Her.” I don’t look that dreadful in this picture…

…but the blue lipstick has got to go. And the matronly — and yet still gapping across the bust — top. Who did I borrow that from, Rue McClanahan?

Hey, look at the tonsils on this guy! I mean, “girl.”

Thank God you can’t see the rest of the picture I cropped this out of. I look like
a giant doily.

What kind of voting adult wears a Snoopy t-shirt?

Wonder no more. I think I actually asked my roommate to take this.

Get ready. This is the worst picture taken of me in recent memory.

Pasty, blotchy, lumpy, weird poofy shadow-hair – I’ve got it ALL, baby.

Dude. Gross. I look sixty years old. I even have a bald spot. My beauty in this shot is enhanced by the fact that I’m desperately
clutching a cigarette in one hand and a pint of Brooklyn Lager in the other. Sex-ay!

You know the pigtails photo I talked about before? Brace yourselves.

What in the name of holy hell went through my mind when I posed for this? Anyway,
if you’ve been up nights wondering about my nostrils, this photo should take care of that,
I suspect.

In my defense, I’m in Halloween costume here.

I dressed as Roy from Siegfried and Roy. Just thank me that I cropped above the sock
bulge in my leggings, okay? Oh. You were eating. Sorry.

I think I was stretching for a tennis lesson. Why someone elected to commit this to film,
I have no idea. I really look like my dad in this picture. Except that my dad is not ugly and,
as of this writing, does not have boobs.

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