Human Flower Project


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Tuesday, September 11, 2007

The Yearbook’s a Stage


The photo of a New Hampshire teenager has been banned from the high school yearbook, because she’s holding a flower.


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Image: Human Flower Project/Chicago Darch-Times

The great challenge of adolescence (which chases most of us around for the next sixty years) is to be both confidently individual and comfortably part of a group: how to stand out and fit in at the same time. It’s tricky, and at no time do the stakes feel higher for pulling that trick off than in high school, when everybody seems to be watching how well or poorly you’re performing.

…which brings us to Melissa Morin, age 17. Melissa is a senior at Merrimack High School in southern New Hampshire. She’s caught the theatre bug, so you can guess which side of the stand out/fit in continuum she leans toward. For her senior photo, Melissa posed in a sundress, barefooted, sitting on a trunk backstage at Manchester’s Palace Theatre. With intensely plucked eyebrows, a prepossessing gaze and an endearing teenage slump, she sits holding a bouquet of red flowers.

Gasp! Merrimack High, apparently, permits no “props” in senior photos, so Melissa’s picture may be omitted from the yearbook. “The high school first set the policy two years ago, but only put it in writing this year, after ‘high profile legal cases’ were brought against school districts related to the content of yearbook photos. Blake Douglass, a Londonderry High School senior, brought a First Amendment case against Londonderry High in 2005 after yearbook editors refused to publish a photo of him with a broken-open shotgun slung on his shoulder.”

A district court judge rejected the student’s case, noting that it had been the yearbook editors, not the school or district, that had censored his picture. But the shotgun (and lawsuit) were enough to prompt several high schools into clamping on rules for senior portraits.

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Melissa Morin’s senior picture, for Merrimack High School

Photo: Brent Mallard, via Nashua Telegraph

Actually, we couldn’t quite make out just what kinds of flowers Melissa held for the photo: clivia? alstroemeria? We consulted friend Brandon Kirkland of Enchanted Florist, who wrote back, “They are silk, so this is a tough one. My guess would be, in this order,  a parrot tulip (the ruffled ones) or a poppy.” Whatever they were, they were enough to constitute a “prop” and so, due to Merrimack’s heavy-handed “fit in” editorial policy, they could keep Morin’s picture out of print.

We consider this silly, since everything that teenagers wear, say, drive around in, eat, or shampoo with constitutes a “prop.” Adolescence is prime time for fiddling with your personal “brand” and, as most of us know, figuring that out seems to necessitate all manner of foolish stunts and unbecoming costumes. It appears that Melissa has a firmer than average grasp on who she is and who she wants to be, and has chosen a shtick that’s perfectly harmless and, in fact, kind of fun. Her decision to hold flowers (as if she’s the lead actress just come back from her last curtain call) is delightful and completely in keeping with an (ahem) budding young actress.

At the same time we relish the controversy of Merrimack High School’s yearbook (the story’s gone out on the Associated Press wire and is being picked up all over the place) because it’s further proof of the cultural firepower of flowers—on a par, it seems, with shotguns.

To Melissa, we say, “Break a Leg!”

 



Posted by Julie on 09/11 at 01:28 PM
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