When I posted a link to this photo,

a thoughtful reader suggested a little equal time or something for my humiliation or adorableness.

Here’s the infamous Blue Bird flying up to Camp Fire Girl ceremony that haunts my dreams. I think the picture is from around 1974. Sadly, upon reading the world-wide-web, I stopped moments before the thing went coed. (Although, I’m pretty sure if any boy in my town signed up, he’d be known as a Camp Fire Faggot.)

The beauty of this picture in my mind is several-fold. First, I apparently was 20-feet tall back in about 5th or 6th grade and have been shrinking ever since. How else to explain that I’m about a foot taller than all of the other girls and as tall as the men in the photo. One of the dads, Mr. O’Brien, in real life was what you might call a long drink of water. Here, he is dwarfed by my collosus.

Secondly, count the parent to little girl ratio. Right there is a story. A story of regret, of an almost life-long sadness, a dream unfilfulled, a wound open. Or maybe Pat wasn’t really my mother or hated me too much to pose alongside me. I am the “orphaned” girl who throws the count off.

Some pinhead without sense of, I don’t know, what would they say in today’s PC jargon, a sense of “difference” in families, alternative maybe? Anyway, some douche decided the perfect thing was a father-daughter picture with the members of our troop. Um, yeah, thanks Einstein, I’m the little, fatherless girl, way to help me blend.

The cow my mother had was doubtlessly in direct proportion to the stupidness she perceived in whoever insisted on the Father/Daughter thang.

She boycotted. Carol Anne’s mom, also named Pat, was not a douche in the least. She tossed her husband out of the roster and replaced him, exhorting my Pat to join her. She would not be moved. The picture was taken, and the giant, woman-sized girl stood alone. (In my mind, there should be a yawning gap where they all step back away from my freakishness and the aloneness comes out in better contrast. Ah well, if only I stage-directed the world.)

Here’s what it really looked like:

Here’s how it looks in my head. (And, Photoshop masking is AWESOME.)