all look same

The Library of Congress is currently holding an exhibit of color photographs from the Depression era. The writer of this article was all excited because unlike the famous black-and-white images from this time period, color photography portrays exactly what the Depression looked like, so now we can witness the Depressees in all of their naturally-hued glory. As fun as this sounds, I just can’t get excited about it. Probably because the only picture they included with the article shows a family in which all of the children are wearing the same ugly outfit. I know that the photo of these cheap outfits is supposed to illustrate the development of mass-produced textile goods for the poorer classes and all of that, but I just can’t escape its uncanny resemblance to my BS-side family pictures from the 1960s. (“BS” meaning “Biological Sire,” a useful denotation that was invented by a friend with a similar family situation.) As legend has it, Grima (that’s how she signed our Bible verse birthday cards every year which were bought in bulk and therefore always contained the same condemning Words of God) would go into town and buy an entire bolt of flannel. She would then cut and sew the same shirt pattern in varying sizes for all six members of her family (not including herself). Buy new bolt of flannel, repeat. The result, of course, was that everyone in the family had the same exact wardrobe. Husband, four sons, one daughter—all the same. With these odds they must have been hard-pressed to dress differently each morning. Was there a rush in the early hours to don your clean flannel first and prevent the other members of the family from wearing the same one to high school that day? Were there fistfights over shirts just as there certainly were over the one bathroom in the house? Somehow I think not for it seems that in every picture I’ve ever seen of this family they are all wearing the same flannel pattern at once. It’s like they went the other way entirely and decided that they would instead become the lamest, most dysfunctional family-army ever. I’ve seen an entire red-neck family dressed in camouflage on their early Saturday morning jaunt to Wal-Mart, but this beats all.

Ugh. Crazy, creepy, and depressing. But hilarious all the same.