Every spring at the school where my mom teaches, the fourth graders have “Character Day.” This was last Friday.

All the kids pick an important person in American history, write a report about the person and make a poster. On Character Day they dress up like their character and sit in chronological order according to character birth year all around the gym.

It’s a public drop-in event. The kids’ families, the school board, all the other classes in the school - they all stop by and do whatever. Ask the kids questions about their characters, give them high fives, give me hugs (no really, I got a few), whatever.

Mama is the fourth grade science teacher and as she’d been at the school the longest of the fourth grade teachers, she was elected to organize the mess this year.

She usually takes pictures with a little camera and uses her own money to make prints for all the kids. I was in town and she asked me to come out, of course I said I’d do it. Mama requested I got individual shots of all the kids, with their name sign in the background so she can keep them all straight later on.

Four hours and 85 fourth graders later…

… I. Was. Exhausted.

Like, I just shot a college football game with overtime exhausted. I think there’s picture somewhere of me passed out spread eagle on the gym floor after it was all over.

Probably had something to do with the 300+ squats I did while dodging waves of school children and general public in a gym that was about a billion degrees hot. I’m surprised the kids didn’t complain more than they did.

When I first got there I did a round getting some group and overall shots and the like and got to know everyone and learned all sorts of cool stuff.

For instance, Abe Lincoln actually has a crush on Abigail Adams, not Mary Todd Lincoln. Mary Todd Lincoln is gross. Teddy Roosevelt actually hates mustaches, Henry Ford prefers Chevrolet, and so-and-so’s dad might be a drunk but he can still punch you in the face. Paul Revere didn’t actually fall off his horse and break his leg - he fell off his bike. He’s still a good dancer though. George Washington can make a bigger muscle than you. Louisa May Alcott thought her own book was boring and Annie Oakley wasn’t allowed to bring a pretend gun to school - luckily, though, shooting people with a green whiffle bat is just as effective. William Clark can do a better split than Dolly Madison, Ulysses Grant doesn’t like cookies and even though Martin Luther King Jr. is in the gifted program, his gifted smarts aren’t going to stop him from getting Neil Armstrong’s space helmet stuck on his head backwards… twice.

And then I did the individual shots.

I’m not a big fan of doing much directing when I take portraits, and unless I have a really bangin’ idea, I try to avoid it if possible. So I gave the kids the option to stand or continue sitting, and told them to give me their best (insert character) impression.

I find it’s just about like anything else in this job. You wait long enough and keep an open mind, you’ll get something worth your while.

Oh, and yeah, you saw right - Sojourner Truth up there is a little while girl in blackface. Mama says when assigning / picking characters, they try to match character skin tones with the kids’ skin tones best they can. I guess something went awry that time. In their defense though, they had zero African American girls in the fourth grade and from across the gym, from the neck up Sojourner looked pretty dead on.

I had a lot of fun with this. Hope I get to go back next year.