Waiting for My Prince

“Someday, my prince will come!”

We don’t sing that any more, now that we have digital cameras. I used to take rolls of film to a nearby drug store that was a member of a now defunct drug store chain and fill in a paper and and put each roll of film in an individual envelope and drop it in a box and wait a week or so. It was honestly kind of cool not to know how the pictures came out until, uh, they came out. And then, since you had to wait, the experience was a little distance from you when you saw the photos.

If you wanted to edit them, you had to use scissors.

Lots of people preferred slides. I never understood why. First you needed tons of equipment just to look at them. You had to sort them — more equipment — and label them. I don’t know of anyone who ever just sat down on a rainy afternoon and thumbed through, oops, set up the projector and screen and reminisced about that time whatever it was. Having recently sorted through hundreds of slides and converted them to digital pictures, I remember well how annoying that all was — and then, a lot of times, you’d look at a slide and say, “Oh! I want prince of that!!!”

I also thought of my Aunt Martha and sitting through hours of slides of her trip to Africa. “There, you can barely see it, but there, there’s a lion!”

One fun thing we did with slides when I was a little kid was project them on the front of our neighbor’s house from the front stoop of our house in Nebraska. Their house was white and they weren’t home.

P.S. The prince above are Stein am Rhein and Stoos, two lovely spots in Switzerland.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/rdp-monday-prince/