While my son and I were working on his senior year photos, we had a great idea:
Recreate my senior photo with him as the subject.
I'm a stickler for the details; if we were going to do this, I wanted it to be as authentic as possible. Same location, same pose, same wardrobe.
Finding the location proved to be the biggest challenge. My senior photos were taken by Bill Burchette of Burchette Photo Studios, and I was fairly certain I remembered where the studio was located downtown. I had a hazy memory of being ushered outside to a nearby alleyway for this photo:
No matter how hard I looked I couldn't find anywhere resembling this location. I wandered up every nearby alley and had no luck finding it.
Through the magic of Facebook, I was able to track down Bill Burchette to ask him just where the heck this photo was taken.
He replied "That fire escape has been removed, when I don't know. I loved working in that old alley."
That was exactly the clue I needed. I had been searching for something that no longer existed. With the new information I found the spot almost immediately. I had walked right by it repeatedly.
The next challenge was wardrobe. I was able to get a black denim jacket off ebay that looked just like my original one (what ever happened to that thing, anyway?) and a Van Halen pin just like the one I bought at the fair when I was 17. My God, eBay rules!
I was even able to dig out my class ring for him to wear. The biggest challenge was going to be finding a matching purple polo shirt. Sounds easy, but it's not.
And then one day it hit me like a bolt of lightning.
I started ripping through my bins in the garage. Concert shirts. Memorabilia. Junk.
And a purple polo shirt.
Not just a purple polo shirt. THE purple polo shirt. The same one that I had my senior photos taken in 31 years earlier. Don't ever tell me that there is no merit to being a packrat. cough cough *horder* cough
Location: Located
Wardrobe: Wardrobed
Results:
When I looked at the calendar, I realized that these two photos were taken 31 years apart, almost to the day.
And yes, I'm still going to hang onto the shirt a while longer. I'm guessing another 31 years.
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