If You Chance to Meet a Frown

by Stephanie Black

There are a multitude of natural laws that govern family life. For instance:

*If you mop your kitchen floor, someone will—before the sun sets—spill his juice.

Last Saturday, we combed our hair, dressed in sort-of-coordinated clothes and herded everyone into the backyard for a family snapshot to stick in our Christmas cards. We were, of course, operating under the regulations imposed by the Law of Family Photos, the first of which reads:

*In any photograph containing four or more people, a minimum of one person must, for any given picture, have a goofy look on his face.

We had seven people in our photo, five of whom aren’t old enough to vote, so we were definitely subject to this law. We took a bunch of pictures, downloaded them, and evaluated the results. Take your choice—the manic chipmunk look, the “we are not amused” look, the winking look, the hand-over-face look, the multi-chinned look, the nearly-closed eyes look and—my personal favorite—the Fish Lips. Apparently someone was getting bored, which brings up the Second Law of Family Photos:

*If you speak the words “Just stand still and smile and we’ll be done with this!” then any child under the age of ten will interpret these words to mean, “Hey, you! Act like a crazed weasel!”

Actually, the kids did quite well, all things considered and several of the photos weren't bad. But given that we didn’t get one really good shot, my husband—who had apparently been snorting Froot Loops—mentioned that we could try again the next day. We quickly nixed that idea. Why go through the photo shoot ordeal when you can . . . Photoshop!

Truth be told, I can’t Photoshop—don’t know a thing about it. But my sister (known to many as the Mean Aunt) is an expert. I e-mailed her what I thought was the best of the pictures. All of us fell somewhere on the not-bad range in that shot, but my older son had a very solemn look on his face. He was smiling in other shots, so I sent Mean Aunt one of those reject shots along with the good one. In a techno-version of the "smile-that-frown away" song of Primary fame, she replaced the frowny face with a smiley one. You’d never know the smile wasn’t his original expression in the picture.

I also asked her if she could change the color of one daughter’s shirt. This shirt had bold white stripes, and I worried that maybe it was too striking compared to the solids everyone else was wearing. My sister fixed the shirt, laboring to darken the white stripes so they didn’t stand out so much. She sent me the finished picture and I decided that I liked the white stripes better after all, and asked her to change it back, after which she sent me a dead squirrel in the mail and placed a curse on me and my descendants.

Just kidding. She said that, luckily for me, she saved her layer shots—I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I sense that it’s important—and she promptly sent me the picture with the smiling son and the white stripes. Isn’t she a genius? Let’s hear it for Mean Aunt!

Next year I think I’ll just send her random photos of family members taken at different points in the year and she can arrange us in portrait formation, giving me perfect hair and toned abs in the process.