Self Portrait Tuesday – April Fool

I had this great idea for this month’s silliness theme, but I left my camera at my parent’s house this weekend, so I’m gonna have to go with a scanned photo.

Anyway, I was trying to think of some silly photos from my childhood, and lots of Halloween costumes came to mind. Most years for Halloween I dressed up as either a) a baseball player (usually Bill Buckner when he was a Cub, before the ball-through-the-legs unpleasantness), or b) something weird my parents came up with. There was the year they dressed me up as Mac Tonight, the singing moon character from the McDonalds commercials. I wore a giant cardboard moon on my head. All day long the other kids made fun of me and asked me for cheeseburgers. Then there was the year they dressed me up as “William Tell’s First Son.” I had an apple on top of my head and an arrow going through my noggin. But the kicker was the giant, sandwich board I wore that read “William Tell’s First Son.” Considering I had no idea who William Tell was, and none of my eight-year-old friends did either, the costume didn’t go over so well. Yep, lots of kids making fun of me that year.

But to choose one of these pics for my silliness self portrait is almost too easy. Plus, it’s not really me being silly as much as me grudgingly going along with my parents’ twisted sense of humor. (By the way, I don’t blame my parents for these outfits. They were just being parents. You see, this is why you have kids. You get to dress them up in silly outfits and send them out in public, and there’s nothing they can do about because they’re kids. I fully intend on doing the same thing to my children. When all the other first graders are dressed up for Halloween as princesses and superheros, my kid will be the one dressed up as Fidel Castro.)

So, for my self portrait this week, I thought I’d go back farther than grade-school costumes. This pic is from Halloween when I was three and my sister was 10. We’re not even dressed up as anything. But did you look at that pumpkin? What is up with that thing? It’s got green peppers for ears, onions for eyes, chili peppers for eyebrows, some sort of gourd for a nose. That pumpkin has my parents written all over it. When all the other houses on the block featured cute, carefully carved pumpkins, our front porch had a pumpkin that was sprouting salad. It’s when I look at pictures like this I remember why my sister and I never really fit in with the other suburban kids.

Thank god.