Where's Waldo?

One Saturday in August 2006, Norman and I were sightseeing near South Royalton, VT, where he was visiting that semester at the Vermont Law School. A sign posted on the front porch of a country store in Tunbridge reminded townspeople to come to the fairgrounds at 4 o'clock that afternoon for the taking of the town picture. We decided this was too important an even to miss.

At 4 o'clock, we joined an estimated 800 Turnbridgians (from a population of about  1,800) who had shown up at the fairgrounds and were milling around in fog and drizzle, in front of a big, black 100-year-old camera set up in the back of a pickup track. The sheriff (yellow rainjacket, front and center) yelled at everybody until the photographer was satisfied. The townspeople were posed in front of the property they owned jointly:  their school bus, fire truck, ambulance, road grader, and snow plow. We stood away from the crowd and watched, along with a very unhappy twelve-year-old and his mother; she wouldn't let him pose with the townspeople because they only lived in Tunbridge on weekends.

Several people held up portraits of people who couldn't be there; other people held up babies, flowers, a Cookie Monster puppet, a scythe, and a geologic cross-section of the mountain behind the town. One man draped a black dog around his neck, and a woman was leading a horse. There was the woman in the purple hat. And in back of the man with red kayak paddles were three infant carseats carrying  . . .  triplets.

Town picture day, we learned, is actually not a Vermont tradition, at least not in Tunbridge. It was a twenty-first-century innovation: somebody had found the old camera in a barn, fixed it up, and decided to try taking a town picture. People seemed happy with the event, and with the photo, and there was talk of making a tradition out of it. Did they do it again in August 2007? Google wouldn't tell me.