Saloon girls.

One day quite a few years ago, I took Peter downtown because I had a surprise for him.  He had no idea where I was taking him and I was getting more excited by the minute as we walked toward out destination.  When the building was in sight and I made it obvious where we were headed, Peter stopped dead in his tracks and refused to go any further.  He might as well have grown roots and planted himself on that stretch of sidewalk.  I thought he was just nervous or playing with me, I didn't think he was serious.  Turns out he was serious.  

And thus ended my plan for us to have out photo taken at Tony's Old Time Portrait Studio.  You know, the type of place where you dress up in period clothing, the resulting photograph is all sepia-toned and you look like a caricature of how your forebears may have looked.  I used to walk by the studio all the time and see the photos in the window and it all looked like so much fun.  A hoot.

Peter was adamant that it wasn't going to happen so I let it drop, but I was bummed.  And to this day he'll bring it up sometimes, in a jokingly-scornful way, to bug me.  It's meant to get a rise out of me and I always take the bait, lamenting that it would have been so funny and we would have had a great time, etc, etc.  I later found out that Peter's whole family, including his Aunt and cousins, all had an old-time photo taken years and years ago, when he was really little.  I don't know if he had a terrible experience at the time, or if he got sick of everyone talking about the photo for years afterward or what the deal is, but he swears he'll never go through it again.  Sigh.

A couple weeks before our wedding, two of my bridesmaids, Kate and Catherine and I went to Banff for my "stagette".  My friends Lisa and Andrew live in Canmore, so we stayed with them and we all had a blast.  My brother Gene even came up from Calgary to go for a great hike in Lake Louise.  It was a really great trip.  Our last night was our big "Ladies Night" out on the town and we spent the night in a hotel on Banff Avenue.   It was a fun, silly night, but I was terribly hungover the next morning and wishing I had left the bar early the night before.  It was not pretty.  Kate and Catherine fared a lot better than I did, and while they went shopping, I crawled back to bed.  They came back later on and dragged me out, saying they had a surprise for me and I couldn't say no (even though I wanted to).  

We walked down Banff Avenue and I tried my best to be excited, but I felt just awful.  Until I realized where we were: Photo Adventures Banff, a studio that specializes in old time photographs.  It was awesome.  We got in there and dressed up and they took our picture and it was as fun as I always hoped it would be.  It was the best present my friends could have bought me and they didn't even know the whole story about Peter and my thwarted attempt until I told them.  Kismet.

Saloon girls.