‘Lean this way. Smile a little.”
That’s a quote from a Columbian photographer during a recent assignment. Not too complicated.
Our photographers usually don’t make big demands on the people who appear on our pages or website.
But national publications? That can be a laundry list of instructions. Really. A magazine staffer told Lori Volkman how to deal with her family’s laundry for two weeks.
We recently wrote about Volkman’s transition from blogging Navy wife, while her husband Randy was in the Middle East, to an advocate for military families. We noted how the national media picked up on the Ridgefield woman’s writings at “Witty Little Secret.”
National coverage included a story in the December 2011/January 2012 issue of Reader’s Digest. It ran with a family portrait of Lori Volkman, daughter Olivia and son Cooper … and a pile of laundry almost as tall as Cooper.
When the Reader’s Digest art director called from New York to discuss the photo shoot at the Volkman home, Lori Volkman mentioned that she wasn’t exactly on top of the housework. She had five loads of unfolded laundry on her bed.
“He said, ‘Don’t change a thing!'”
So, “We pulled laundry from the pile (to wear) and I would add to the stack when I did another load.”
Eventually, Volkman said, she moved the stack from the bed to the floor — “Clean laundry on the floor!” — until the Reader’s Digest photo team was due to arrive.
“That was the first thing the photographer wanted to see,” she said.
But the photographer liked the light in the living room much better than in the bedroom. So they wrapped up the entire laundry stack in a sheet and hauled it downstairs, then piled it up in front of the couch for the family portrait.
And Volkman could finally fold her laundry.
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
