Dopey photos should go up in smoke

Somewhere, if you look hard enough, you’ll find it.

Somewhere, in a drawer in a forgotten dresser or in an envelope of old newspaper clippings, you’ll find it: A photograph you’d like to burn.

You’re in it, of course, looking — take your pick — fatter, stupider, clumsier, older or simply goofier than you’d ever like to be remembered once you’re gone.

Let’s just say, it’s not one of those snapshots you want them to trot out at Baird-Freeman or Williamson and Spencer or MJS Mortuaries when you finally clock out.

You wouldn’t be there to see it, but just the same it’s the last thing you want taped to a piece of poster board or incorporated into a Powerpoint slide show.

You’d rather see it burn.

Like you, I have several that come to mind.

There was a Polaroid shot taken my freshman year in college. Some pranksters had taken a number of clothing items from a coed’s belongings and had hung them from a balcony in the college dining hall.

Another group of pranksters — of which I was a member — grabbed the items of clothing on our way out of the dining hall that night. At the next supper, we showed up with half of us in drag and the others dressed as “dates.”

And then, right before we gave the clothing back, we of course posed for a picture.

I’ll always be thankful that I wasn’t in drag, but it’s an embarrassing photo just the same.

Then there’s a whole series of photos taken on the stairs at my parents’ house. My brother and his family would come down from Minnesota for a visit, and the morning they left to go home my mother would insist on taking pictures.

The fact that I had just gotten out of the shower never seemed to make a difference, but the wet head made me look like a refugee from the cast of “Grease.”

Connie’s mother had a similar photo ritual at the cabin in New Hampshire. Before departing, everyone was gathered in front of the fireplace for a group shot.

Some of them were fine, but just as many are ridiculous.

Connie recently came across a few with our niece Myra. While the two of us don’t look too bad, Myra — who was about five at the time — is making grotesque faces in each of them. Maybe we should send them to her so she can burn them.

Digital cameras and selfies have only made matters worse. 

It’s probably safe to say that there are three times as many embarrassing and unflattering photos of you today as there were 10 years ago. (Isn’t technology great?)

And the number keeps growing.

Just last month I posed in a paper party hat with a couple of friends for a guy’s 70th birthday. Safe to say, we all looked like dopes.

The only good thing is that when the Powerpoint slide show is unveiled at Baird’s or W&S or MJS or wherever, you won’t have to witness it.

That is, I admit, small comfort under the circumstances. But you take what you can get.