This Might Be The Best Yearbook Photo Ever
There’s a high school student in Schenectady, N.Y. who is petitioning to have a very special photo used as his senior picture for his high school’s yearbook. No, it’s not a picture of him smiling straight ahead at the camera or looking dreamily off into the distance or any of your typical high school yearbook poses. Actually, I guess this dude is kind of looking dreamily off into the distance. But he’s holding a cat. And there are lasers in the background, cutting back and forth across a super-imposed image of the cat’s floating head.
All the magic and mystery, below.
Sixteen-year-old Draven Rodriguez explained to the Daily Gazette, “I don’t want to go in the yearbook with the generic ‘I-look-like-everyone-else’ photo. I wanted a ‘He looks great. Only he would try that’ photo.”
Rodriguez was asking for 500 signatures for his petition. As of now, he has over 4,000. So will this be enough to get his photo into the yearbook?
“This photo won’t be a senior portrait but it can be in another area,” school district spokeswoman Karen Corona told the Daily News. “We’re not trying to not allow him to be creative, but the senior portraits have a professional look. They’re all the same,” she said.
Corona informed the paper that she will speak with Rodriguez’s principal on the matter, but said the book will feature “a lot of areas where students are allowed to express their creativity.”
So it looks like Rodriguez is going to get kind of what he wanted (the photo in the yearbook) but not EXACTLY what he wanted (the photo that ten years down the line at the reunion makes all his classmates go “DUDE! I can’t believe they let you use THAT as your senior photo”). We’ll chalk this up to a partial victory for Rodriguez. Maybe more than just a partial victory. After all, he did take an AMAZE photo and got everyone on social media talking about how yearbooks as a rule skew a little serious and could use a little bit of the jokester spirit amidst their pages.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for yearbook-photo inspiration, you might want to check out Awkward Family Photos. I mean, it looks like it worked for Rodriguez.
