The idea was that we would attend my parents' 50th wedding anniversary party in cardboard form. My husband, children, and I might be corporeally on a different continent, I thought, but our cutouts would be there for people to pose with and drunkenly offer flutes of champagne. You can get a life-size cardboard cutout of yourself for AUD$150. I chose a photo of us at pre-K graduation last year, looking perhaps the best we will ever look, masks on our chins. It would fit right in among the trays of spinach and cheese triangles at the golf club where they were having the party—the perfect present.
Then Omicron came and the party was called off.
The order was already in by that point, someone busy jigsawing around our elbows, and we arrived on my parents’ friends’ doorstep a few weeks early. Rather than just driving us over to my folks’ like “ta-daaaa,” N. and G. offered to wait until the day of the shuttered party, prop us outside my parents’ house, ring the doorbell, and hide.
On the day, N. was on camera duty and G., who is in his nineties, poked the doorbell and did the hiding, squatting behind the cutout ready to jump out with a bottle of champagne. Absolute legend.
Cardboard cutouts can go either way; sometimes they’re fun, sometimes a bit creepy. There is the cardboard "ghost" of Ted Danson that haunts Three Men and a Baby; the desolate crowd of "party cutouts" in The Lonely Guy that seem a little too close to reality; locomotive Michael Jordan in Home Alone. Outside the popular discourse, there is the cutout of George W. Bush an old-timer brought into the Breckenridge ski school locker room circa 2003 that almost got Noodles punched in the face (he drew a mustache on it and the owner took to fisticuffs). Getting a cardboard cutout of yourself feels a bit Main Character Syndrome-y, like you’re spending all your energy manifesting pop art of yourself into other people’s homes. Would it be funny or weird? It was hard to tell.
My biggest worry with the thing was that my parents would briefly think we were really there, then be disappointed. My uncle once did that—flew in from the Seychelles to surprise my grandparents on their doorstep in Canberra. A bold move when your dad has had a quadruple bypass, but I remember it being a big hit.
This was too!
Delighted, Dad carried us into the living room and stood us by the breakfast table.
"They're so lifelike!" he kept telling me over FaceTime, seated by my cutout, as we approached two years apart.
The longer the pandemic has worn on, the more it has felt like an episode of Black Mirror, with the fortieth birthdays taking place as a game of Hollywood Squares on Zoom and emails reminding me that Grandma’s Skylight photo frame hasn’t received any new photos in a while, the kids frozen in time at an earlier age on her kitchen counter.
I wrote a piece a while back for Wired about how tech has tried (and mostly failed) to create ~connection~ across space and beyond the mortal veil — through videocalls, long-distance haptic teddy bears, holograms, Wordle groups texts, chatbots of your dead loved one, and, in the case of Shutterfly, the suggestion that I buy a mug of my mum posing with a wax figurine of Serena Willams in reminiscence.
Cardboard cutouts are the analog of all this, the simplest solution to holding someone close, outside of clutching their decomposing corpse—if you forgot, last year, “Mother God” (aka Amy Carlson), the leader of the Love Has Won cult, was found mummified in a Colorado living room “covered in Christmas lights and with the eyeless sockets of her skull decorated with glitter.” She had passed away and was then turned into a shrine by her followers. Reporting established that:
Ms Carlson is believed by her group to be 19 billion years old and to have birthed all of creation. Despite her age, the members also believe she is the child of former president Donald Trump.
There is simply no rationalizing our attachments.
Cardboard, though: surprisingly practical, and not as bad for the environment as flying around the world in a jet. Propped in your house, they provide a shape and size for the hole left by someone who is far away.
The “life-size” cutout came with a bonus miniature cutout that my dad began to tote on his travels. Additional photographs came in of us on the beach, among the gnomes in the fairy garden, out on the golf course. Where my parents went, so did we.
Thus, I passed on the derangement of distance to my family in Australia, imagining their friends finding them having afternoon tea with a flatpack of their daughter, son-in-law, and grandcheeldren.
The thought of my parents carrying around their two-dimensional grandchildren feels a bit too Cornfield Chase—a symbol of pandemic alienation, of lives shrunk and condensed into the TikTok frame, all nostalgia and no present moment—but I have decided to see the cardboard as a placeholder for when we make it back to Australia. For June. Soon my father can lovingly fold us into the recycling bin and wheel us out to the curb.
I last saw us in the pool room; close by, but out of the main thoroughfare. My parents had packed up ready to go interstate to meet the newest Manley, a perfect little chippy. He arrived just in time to make the next reunion, a brand new character in our camera rolls (“Add Name”).
“We have to do a proper family photo in July!” I texted my dad as the first photo came in of him holding his new grandson.
He promised to dig out the gear.
Maybe I’ll get some cutouts made of that. One for each of our homes.
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How it happened
Scout’s crush came to her seventh birthday, and wanted to give her a rose. They couldn’t find a rose so he brought a carnation. Somewhere between his home and ours, his little brother accidentally pulled off the flower petals, so he ended up giving her a stem wrapped in tissue paper.
She loved it!
Goodies
Special skills: Want to hear a guy who says he can guess the correct number of seeds in a mandarin put to the test? Skip to 29:00 in this episode from Hamish and Andy’s poddy for the segment—I think it gets really exciting at about 37:00. This is what pods are for I am telling you!!
More podding: h/t to P. for bringing me this one on “Your Woman” by White Town — it’s got Marxism, it’s got the feminist lens, an immigrant POV, just layers of reference, and yes you do know the song.
That one led me to this other episode from Sound and Vision; an interview with Cat Power who talks about some heavy stuff and then wanders into an aside about how her son hates when she plays sad/beautiful songs. It hits on something about how after kids, you become a kind of emotional Scott Bakula, every bit of sensory info a tunnel to multiple timelines.
I don’t need to tell you to sign up for Brooding, by Kathryn Jezer-Morton, but what a way to ride out of the gates for her first lap of The Cut, picking apart the ~gestures~ toward advocacy and ready-made lingo of the internet in the context of abortion + mommy influencers: “The very rhetorical devices meant to help moms overcome inequities have the effect of selling them short.” Yee-haw.
Drew Austin on Dimes Square for Dirt: “This may, in fact, be the real vibe shift: viewing the physical world less as a source of direct experience than as material for online consumption.”
I’m reading The Space Between the Stars by Indira Naidoo and loving ittt — my new favorite from the genre of, as my friend J. put it, “TK on grief, trees, and what it means to be human.”
If you haven’t yet read Nightbitch I’ll see you out on the curb at midnight.
Kristen Wong on what is lost in translation between her language and her mother’s.
A footnote: “How Affluence Pulls People Away From Their Families” by Stephanie H. Murray
Also: The Eating in Bed Cookbook via the Department of Salad.
Vale Roger Angell! “Home movies are killers: Zeke, a long-gone Lab, alive again, rushing from right to left with a tennis ball in his mouth; my sister Nancy, stunning at seventeen, smoking a lipstick-stained cigarette aboard Astrid, with the breeze stirring her tied-up brown hair; my mother laughing and ducking out of the picture again, waving her hands in front of her face in embarrassment—she’s about thirty-five. Me sitting cross-legged under a Ping-Pong table, at eleven. Take us away.”
“The Carthaginians believed that the good fortunes of their society or of wealthy individuals could only be maintained if these babies were sacrificed, pure and whole to their exacting gods.” — Rafia Zakaria
I reported this in 2018, and we’re still there.
And Meg Conley is always so good — she’s been dissecting Christy Dawn catalogues:
Thank you for reading KAFKA’S BABY <3 <3
A cardboard cutout of yourself
Life not live …
Love the story , the idea of the cutout and the cutout. Amazing ! Looks so real !
Family … the most important part of live.❤️❤️❤️