A Twelfth Open Letter to Lifetouch School Portraits

Dear Lifetouch School Portraits,

I have lost the ability to be surprised by how many letters I need to write you folks. Your capacity to suck at your jobs apparently has no limit.

I just felt like you might want an update on the saga of Rat Boy - my fourth-grader whom you took a photo of a few weeks back. As you can tell from the proof sheet you sent us, your photographer managed to capture Son Number Three inexplicably doing his best impression of a hungry rodent on the trail of a delicious odor wafting through the air.

Thanks, again, for that. I thought it was hilarious, but his mom is still holding out hope that you might take a decent picture of him some day, so here we are.

I assume you are aware that today is the day you scheduled for picture retakes. And, once again, you didn’t disappoint in the we-picked-the-worst-possible-day-for-this category. You have managed to schedule your picture days so poorly for so many years I have developed a new theory. I used to think you didn’t have access to our school events schedule, or you had it but didn’t care.

But this same scheduling debacle has occurred so consistently that now I see the truth. You must have our schedule, and you must be reading it very carefully, choosing the most conflicting days on purpose for some maniacal reason I’m not able to comprehend because I was born with the urge to be good at my job. There’s just no possible way someone could pick random days that conflict with our schedule so many times in a row. You would be making your living at a roulette wheel instead of behind a camera if that were the case.

So, I just want to congratulate you on your choice of days this year. You obviously know that this is Red Ribbon week at our school, where we take a stand against drugs by wearing whacky clothes. (Normally it’s the drug addicts who wear weird clothes, but we’ve flipped the script, as the cool kids say.)

Today, of course, is Pajama Day. This schedule overlap has happened multiple times in the past, as you know. It stands to reason, now that I know you’re doing this on purpose. You must be thinking, “All of our pictures are amazing since we’re so damned good at our jobs, so if those ingrate parents didn’t like the picture we took of junior in his Sunday best, I guess they want a portrait of him in his footie Power Ranger jammies.”

That makes perfect sense.

Besides being Pajama Day for the rest of the school, I’m not sure if the fourth grade event scheduled today was on the calendar you received. Just in case it wasn’t, I’ll give you a heads-up.

Each year, our fourth-grade classes learn all about the Gold Rush, culminating in a three-day, two-night field trip to Coloma, CA - the very spot where the first obnoxiously-large nugget of gold was discovered by James Marshall, who then immediately bought the first obnoxiously-yellow Lamborghini.  

A big part of the gold rush experience is getting all dressed up in their 1849 clothes for the trip.

They leave today on the bus.

Thankfully, they are able to get their retake pictures done before they load up. So, the boy you captured the first time looking like a hungry rat will now be re-shot dressed as Clem the intrepid Missourian prospector.

The hat and bandana he’s wearing should play nicely with the theme, but what will really seal the deal is if his teacher can find some black stickum or some electrical tape for his dental work.

If she can’t find what we need, can you guys do me a favor and just digitally edit out most of his teeth? That will complete the look perfectly. I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks a million!

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

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Witch Books Don't You Like?

I was selling and signing books at a recent event, and a grandmother was perusing my table, asking various questions. She was looking at my picture books for her kindergarten-aged grandkids, but she also had a fourth-grade grandson.

I’m not sure if you’re aware of this or not, but I recently released the third book in the Sycamore Detective Agency series. It just came out last week. I think your family will like the series, and I was pretty sure her grandson would, too. So, I was trying to steer her in that direction.

I showed her the books, highlighting the shiny yellow cover of Case Number Three, hot off the press, and inquired about his reading level. I asked what kind of chapter books he was reading.

She responded that she didn’t know.

Trying a different angle, I inquired about what I consider to be the modern universal benchmark for assessing elementary-grade reading ability. (Plus, I just like mentioning my books in the same conversation as hers.)

“Has he read any of the Harry Potter books yet?” I asked.

That’s when things got weird.

She said, with total conviction, “Oh, I hope not. I hate Harry Potter.”

Umm… huh?

To me, as a father, an author, and a human, this idea simply did not register.

I hate Harry Potter. The strange words rang in my ears.

What???

She may as well have said, “I hate water,” or “Puppies are ugly,” or “I hate babies and pizza.” Any one of those things would have made as much or more sense to me.

I was so flummoxed by her comment, I wasn’t even able to continue the conversation. I simply didn’t know what to say.

If she had said, “I’m not sure. I’m not really too much of a fan of those books,” or, “I don’t know. I’ve never read any of them myself,” I might have been able to move forward with the chat. But she didn’t say that.

What she said was she hopes her grandson never reads those books because she hates them. I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask why! I have a life to lead, and in my mind, any person who is going to utter the words “I hate Harry Potter,” is a complete and total conversational and emotional wild card. Asking “Why?” would have been like pulling the pin on a “possibly dead” grenade.

Now, I realize that it takes all kinds to make this world go around, but I wasn’t even aware that this kind existed. Maybe I’ve been living in a literary bubble, but to me, Harry Potter is like a default setting. It’s the taco of the book world. Everyone likes it. At the very least, in the elementary school literary world.

With my mind spinning listlessly into the new reality of the existence of Potter Haters, I struggled to regain equilibrium on my life and on the task at hand – selling my books. After taking a drink of water and willing myself not to run away from my own author table in fear for my life, I said the only logical thing there was left to say.

“These books are nothing like Harry Potter.”

I signed all three of them, “Good luck, kid. You can read these when you’re locked in the closet under the stairs at Grandma’s house.”

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

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Q & Eh?

It’s that time of year again.

Tragically-early Halloween decorations on houses, you ask? Christmas stuff on sale in October at Home Depot, you say?

Well, yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s elementary school author visit season for me, and we’re in the peak of it. Reading to and talking with kids ranks in my top ten favorite things to do of all time.

I recently released the third book in the Sycamore Detective Agency series, and I’m thrilled about that, as well. Releasing new books ranks in my top six favorite things to do of all time. I will leave things one through five up to your imagination, and no, one of them is not putting up holiday decorations of any kind.

One of the things that makes school visits so enjoyable for me is the questions the kids ask me about my job. Sure, when I talk to the older grades, I tend to get some silly, trivial questions like, “How do you develop good quality characters?”, and “Can you describe your process for outlining a story?”

Those questions are adorable, so I do my best to answer them with a kind smile on my face, but let’s be serious – that’s hardly what young aspiring authors need to know. Thankfully, the kindergarteners always get right to the meat of the issues.

“Does anyone have any questions for me about being an author?”

“How old are you?”

“Can you read us another book?”

“You’re bald.”

“Could a jackal eat a person? How about a cardboard person? An alien? A ghost?"

“How tall are you?”

“Why are there so many words?”

“Do you know my dad?”

“How did you make the words?”

[pointing to the class library shelves] “Did you write all those books?”

“You have lots of fillings in your teeth.”

“My grandma has those same shoes, but in black.”

“How do you make the words different colors?”

“How do the pages stay in the book?”

“My dad’s name is Mark.”

These are the hard-hitting literary issues that need to be addressed. These are the crucial questions that every budding author should be asking.

My recent personal favorite was in a kindergarten class last week. A little girl in the front row sat pensively for a few seconds after I called on her, then the burning question she had been waiting to ask an author all her life popped into her head.

“Where do you get dressed?”

For a split second, I thought she might be roasting me, and she was going to come right back with, “In the dark?”

She didn’t though. She just gazed up at me and smiled, proud of her insightful literary question.

“In my room,” I responded.

Her eyes went wide. “Wow! Me too!” she gasped.

Well, there you go, sweetheart. You’re practically an author already.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

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Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

An Eleventh Open Letter to Lifetouch School Portraits

You know, Lifetouch, I never thought I would need to write eleven separate letters to you, but here we are.

As you know, we broke up with you for fall pictures, so I’m not writing about a problem with my order. There was no order. But after receiving the “you still have time to order” page from you yesterday, emblazoned with Son Number Three’s something-other-than-smiling face on six different fun backgrounds, something needed to be said.

I have tried over the years to help you in many ways. I’ve selflessly shared my time and business knowledge with you. I’ve given you countless nuggets of valuable advice for free, so that you could hopefully begin to see things from a perspective obviously lacking in your organization – that of a human with a brain.

I see now that all my time and effort has been wasted. The 8-1/2 x 11 FujiFilm flyer you just sent me, urging me to purchase beautiful portraits of my youngest son, is glaringly hideous proof that you have not heard a single word I said.

How can I be expected to help you do your job when you don’t even know what it is? You seem to think your job is to sell me pictures of my kids. You are wrong. That is the business you are in. Your job is to take their picture. There’s a difference between the business you’re in and the job you have to do. You can’t survive in any business if you don’t do your job.

I always figured this went without saying, given the business you’re in, but again, here we are. In this country, when people sit down to have their portrait taken, they are expecting to have that portrait actually look like them. It’s their personal choice to smile or not, but inevitably, one hundred percent of them will be expecting to actually see a picture of themselves as the final result.

I imagine by now, you are sensing my issue here, but let me give you some background on Son Number Three just to solidify my point. He is a good-looking kid. And I’m not being an overly proud dad, and I’m not looking at him through rose-colored glasses. Now don’t get me wrong – I think all three of my boys are handsome gents, but Number Three is just flat-out good looking. And so you know I’m not being vain, I’ll tell you he gets it almost exclusively from his mother’s side. He looks just like her father, who looked just like Paul Newman in his younger years.

Our little Paul Newman knockoff has radiant ice-blue eyes and a joyous smile. Neither of those things are apparent in the picture you recently took of him.

Sure, he’s had his past struggles with CFSD (Chronic Forced Smile Disorder), but this issue goes way beyond that. He was one of the CFSD success stories. His last few organized family portraits showed little to no sign of his early issues with the disorder. He has learned to smile for a camera the way he smiles for a joke. You have taken that away from us.

Standing behind the old-timey wooden school chair in the classroom, or the library, or the plain slate gray background, he is squinting like he’s searching for a ship on the sun-glared horizon.

For reasons unknown, his normally room-lighting smile is missing, replaced by what appears to be his facial impression of a rat sniffing for a tasty morsel at the bottom of a Dumpster.

His entire face is squished up, with his lips curled in such a fashion I can envision no other scenario than your photographer asking him to do his best impression of a rodent.

OK, sniff for the delicious garbage. Good! Now curl your lips over your teeth and make the squeaky rat noise. Perfect! Got it. Next.

And a special thanks for the useless free gift at the bottom of this sheet. Your complimentary SmileSafe cards, meant to be an aid to law enforcement in the unthinkable event that my child ever went missing, are completely useless. I would be better off drawing a stick figure of my child and describing his features in Latin to the police than giving them this picture of some random rodent boy. He could be standing next to me when I handed them this picture and they wouldn’t be able to find him.

Tell me I’m wrong, Lifetouch. Give me some explanation, in this age of digital cameras and LCD flat screen TVs, why you couldn’t see how bad this picture was the very second you took it. You have the good-looking happy-go-lucky child right there in front of you. Tell me you could honestly pick him out of a lineup based on the rat picture you just took. I dare you.

The only other remote scenario I can think of that could explain this picture is if you have taken the Americans with Disabilities Act too far and actually started hiring blind photographers.

That would explain this perfectly.

Best of luck,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!