Parent life / August 2018
The Green Shirt Disappeared on Picture Day
A Missouri mother planned her seventh grader's school photo down to the squint. Nobody mentioned the green screen.
In August 2018, Laurel Hutsell of Imperial, Missouri, did picture day properly. Her oldest son was starting seventh grade at Seckman Middle School, and picture day was the first day. A couple of days ahead they went through his collared dry-fit shirts. The dark gray might blend into last year's gray background. The navy had been worn. The turquoise was last year's. That left the green one. "It was the green shirt's turn," she said later.
Then they practiced. Don't squint. Smile as if somebody said something funny, not as if somebody is sneaking up behind you. Run your fingers through your hair. Ask the photographer if it looks okay before the click.
He came home after the first day and mentioned a problem. The photographers were using a green screen.
Two days later the proofs arrived by email from the photo company: his head and arms floating over an American flag, over fall foliage, over pastels, with no shirt and no middle. "I opened it on my phone and I did a double take," she told TODAY. She posted them on Facebook and asked friends to vote. "We were partial to the flags," she told KOAT.
The company told her the proofs had gone out before the complete imaging process and fixed the shirt back in. They also sent her the floating-head versions to keep, forever.
Every parent has a version of this. You plan the smile, the hair, the collar, and the thing that goes wrong is the one thing you decided was settled.
For the eldest's fourth-grade photo we discussed the bangs for a week. My wife trimmed them on a Sunday night. They were fine. The photo came back and they were fine. What was not fine was the youngest, then a baby, who had been fed sweet potato before the drop-off and, in the course of a goodbye hug, transferred most of it to her sister's collar. It is orange. It is right there in the frame. It is also in the yearbook.
Mrs. Hutsell's story has a better ending than ours. She said that afterward she saw her son at the bus stop with his friends, and they were all wearing green shirts.
We have nothing like that. The eldest has never worn orange again.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Laurel Hutsell’s picture-day account, Love What Matters lovewhatmatters.com
- TODAY: Seventh-grader’s choice of green shirt results in hilarious school pictures today.com
- KOAT: Green shirt causes hilarious school picture mishap koat.com