SMILE! YOU’RE ON CAMERA
Chapter one: I am born
David Copperfield
The “in” thing these days is to turn baby’s birth into a photo shoot. I cannot think of anything more horrifying for the mother, more humiliating for the baby and more American for the revenue it creates.
Americans just love money. If we can charge for it, we are there. It all began with dog walking…why take out someone’s puppy for fun when you can get them to pay for it? If Fido (who frankly doesn’t give a tinker’s damn if you are in the room as long as he has his food and a place to poop) might get lonesome while you are out earning his kibble, why not pay five times as much as his daily scoop to have some idiot who cannot earn a living in an office drag the pooch to the park.
Then there are the cat hotels. Why should your cat who obviously has good taste…he hasn’t run away from you, has he?… suffer in an empty house without you? So to ease your conscience, and keep him from scratching the furniture or chewing the baby, you decide to pay more per diem for Fluuffy to get stroked, fed and pampered than you paid for the flight and hotel package.
Ah, but that is not all. What about the people who charge you for petrol because you are sitting in their automobile going to the same place they are? Or the ones who make you pay a rental for a sweater you wanted to borrow for the dance? They have figured out how to make capitalism pay and every one of us buy into it.
Now we have the photographers who figured out how a random picture can catapult them into the big bucks. What with cell phone cameras and Polaroid’s, instant photography is at our fingertips. Nothing is sacred. Look at face book…pictures of a doll that was mutilated, a sunset in a place you would never go, a wounded toe…all there to share with your friends who couldn’t care less about your toe, your doll or your sunset.
I simply cannot imagine having a photographer I barely know staring at body parts that heretofore I had kept concealed in my underwear, watching me heave moan, writhe and suffer through one of the most painful though gratifying human acts. I simply cannot fathom wanting a shot of my kid pushing his way out of my vagina covered with slime and afterbirth looking like he should be recycled. Once that picture is taken it is frozen in time. Why get a photographer to record a moment that you want to end as fast as possible so you can get on with life?
Imagine how your little boy will feel when he introduces you to the love of his life and you whip out a picture of him wrinkled, wet and covered with blood and say, ”That’s how he looked when he was born!” followed by the inevitable, ”Wasn’t he precious?”
For my part, I want the kid cleaned up before I look at him. I want my forehead cooled, my stitches done and a good mop up job before I smile and say “cheese.” I may be in denial but if I am going to record a birth, I want it to look gorgeous. I want to remember the life I created, not its cost. The good news is that I never WILL have to make that choice. That is one of the true joys of aging.
Being born is like being kidnapped
Then sold into slavery.
William Shakespeare
