When it comes to smiling, some of us should be living in Canada. While teaching a creative writing class to elementary students earlier this year, I mentioned the decline of laughter and smiling among people as they grow older. According to a study done several years ago, I told them, four-year-olds in this country laugh and smile as many as 400 times a day. By comparison, adults in the study laughed and smiled an average of 16-17 times a day. An excited "Oh, oh, oh!" suddenly exploded in the room and one boy’s hand shot into the air. All heads in the room turned in unison to hear what he had to say. "My dad never smiles!" he blurted out. "He doesn’t even smile when his picture’s being taken." In support of his outburst, a few other students volunteered that their own parents only smiled three, five or perhaps 10 times a day. It’s apparent the boy’s father and others like him would appreciate the latest news from the Canadian Passport Office. Effective immediately, Canadians applying for passports must submit photos showing their "neutral expressions." In other words, they cannot smile, frown, glare or grimace for the cameras. It all has to do with the war on terrorism. If we smile the terrorists have won, or something like that. That’s a tall order for most of us, who are conditioned the minute we’re born to smile whenever there’s a camera in the room. Screaming babies, politicians in heated debates, people from all walks of life flash their pearly whites, or the spaces where pearly whites should be or used to be, whenever they see a camera. We also smile automatically when we hear the magic words, "Say cheese!" Those two words are the photographic equivalents of Ali Baba’s "Open sesame!" in "The Arabian Nights." We smile at cameras for most of the stepping stones of life – – birthday parties, holidays, graduations and weddings. Well, most of us do at weddings, but that’s another column. Of course, there are always exceptions and there are times when we never smile for cameras. A prime example would be the mug shots taken at police stations when felons and other troublemakers, who probably never sat through a creative writing class, are booked. Models never seem to smile in the "before" photos in before-and-after ads, which promote products and services for weight loss, varicose vein removal or teeth whitening. Their scowls serve to demonstrate how miserably unhappy they were before the changes were made. Depending upon the circumstances, we may or may not smile for driver license photos. It’s difficult to smile whole-heartedly when you’ve just blatantly lied about your real hair color and weight to someone who looks quite official. There are photos of people not smiling but also unaware that their photos were being taken. This would include subjects shown in video still-shots of convenience store robberies or grainy photos of couples taken through half-drawn window curtains by seedy-looking, private investigators. (I once saw that in a movie.) As a result of the new Canadian Passport Office "neutral look" requirement, our neighbors to the North will no longer look happy and well-adjusted in their passport photos.
