One of the things that greeted me my junior year in high school was the first yearbook that included me in it. On the first day of school, I saw the yearbook teacher (who was also my English II S teacher from sophomore year) with a prototype. The yearbooks wouldn't be distributed for at least a couple of more weeks, but she had one in her hand. I asked to see it. She said she couldn't really show it to me, but I said I just wanted to see my individual picture.
In all the years that I had gone to school, I had always received notice the day before the photographer was going to be at the school to take class pictures. This allowed me to know that I needed to be cleaned up and dressed nicely so that I could take a good photo. However, that didn't happen during sophomore year. We all showed up on Monday and they ambushed us. There was no announcement ahead of time. They just started pulling us out of our English classes.
My sophomore year, I had gotten into a very bad habit of not washing my hair every single day. The reason being was that it took at least 15 minutes to blow-dry my hair. I didn't like wasting all that time, so I would just take a shower and hope that neither of my parents came upstairs to find I hadn't shampooed my hair. They typically left for their teaching jobs before I had to leave for school. Sometimes, I could completely avoid them in the morning.
Those first few weeks of high school, it really didn't matter how I looked at school, but I would have cared to know THAT WE WERE HAVING PICTURES TAKEN! I didn't even bother to look at the pictures when they were available a few weeks later, so it was almost a year before I saw it in the yearbook.
I was shocked to see how much of a loser I looked like. This yearbook photo was going to be my permanent record of my time in the 10th grade, and there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Fortunately, by this time, I was a lot more hygenic in the morning and washed my hair every day.
Eventually, the yearbooks were passed out. On the bright side, there were other photos of me in the yearbook. I was in Choir and the Drama Club and was able to be present for those sessions. Although there was an issue with Traz, who took photos for the yearbook and was supposed to show up for the Choir's pop ensemble portrait. However, she flaked. By the time we were able to re-arrange the session, my glorious long hair had been shorn. I didn't look like myself, so much so that in the ensemble's group photo in the yearbook, someone else's name appeared on the photo, NOT MINE! Everytime someone gave me their yearbook to sign, I would cross out that name and put mine in. I wanted to make sure people knew that was me and not that twerp from band who had nothing to do with choir.
Most schools allow the seniors to submit photos that were taken by a professional for the yearbook. All the other underclassmen had to use the school photographer on the day they showed up to take pictures. However, our school was different in that the juniors were also permitted to use professionals. However, not all the juniors did that, and you could see the difference between the professional and the school pictures. (Some seniors also had to resort to using the school photographer for their yearbook photos. Those students must have been REALLY poor.)
But the thing that it feels like everybody pays attention to is the index. You want to see who has the most page numbers next to their name. My sophomore year, I probably had about four page numbers, even though I appeared in other photos in which I was not identified. Compare that to the alpha males and females who participated in all the sports and were listed on 20 or 30 pages. My numbers increased my junior and senior years, but still nowhere near that level.
There were a couple of strange things about the yearbook. Several of the seniors pictured were people I never remember seeing on campus. A classmate pointed at certain people and said, "I don't remember him, or him or her, but they were supposedly here the whole time! Where were they?" Seniors (with all their credits in order) got to take a period off, and many of them chose the first class, so that meant we never saw them before school.
Sadly, I no longer have my high school or my college yearbooks (in which I had even fewer photos). I had put them in this storage facility owned by my father along with a lot of other possessions (including my vinyl record collection). When he lost the property, he forgot all that stuff was there and the person who bought it took everything out to the landfill.
Personally, I never needed to look through those yearbooks again, but it stinks that I won't be able to show my son what I was like in high school. School yearbooks have a tendency to reflect that era of your life so well. I know what it was like to see my father's old yearbooks.
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