What was I thinking?

This weekend is one of the biggest of the year for our family. It's Relay weekend! Besides it being the culmination of a year's worth of planning, it's the time we set aside to formally recognize how blessed we are. We began Relaying five years ago to celebrate Rob's (and our dear friend Lisa's) fifth year cancer-free. We drank the purple Kool-aid, so to speak, and here we are five years later, ready to celebrate Rob's TENTH year free from cancer. Relay is not just my full-time job, it's an enormous part of our identity as a family.

It's gotten to the point that the Becker name is synonymous with Relay For Life for many people. We both bleed purple, so when it came time to film a new recruitment video for Relay nationwide, my lovely coworker decided that Rob was the perfect spokesperson for survivor involvement.

Some background: There are 3.5 million people involved in Relay, including 500,000 cancer survivors. We know that we can make a huge impact (even beyond the $400 million we'll raise this year) if we mobilize those participants to do other things year-round that fight the disease. Rob is a textbook case of someone who dipped his toe in the Relay pool, and went on to be on the front lines of the cancer fight. I'm proud, can you tell?

Back to my story... Because Rob was chosen to be in this new video, we have a four-person film crew joining us at the Relay this weekend to capture his story and footage of all of us celebrating together. Because that film crew is coming, the local paper has decided that they want to do a feature on Rob, too.

I work in PR. That means I like to promote good stuff that can help other people. It also means I like to stay behind the scenes! So, you can imagine my horror when I found out that the paper, with a circulation of 80,000+, wants background photos. I was digging through our stash, trying to find a few good shots of us at Relay, and came across the photo you see above.

Which brings me to this bit of well deserved self deprecation. WHAT WAS I THINKING?

No one should be so dedicated to an event that they see fit to go out in public, much less be photographed, like that.

I do recall that I started out the day in jeans and that tshirt. My hair was not covered, and the boots made sense in the wet grass.

Let's review what's wrong with that picture:

1. Purple bandanna? It says "cancer sucks" on the back. I promise to leave that bit of headgear to the teenagers from now on. It looks like a costume on me.

2. Since when did my ears look like I belong with the Keebler elves?

3. Turquoise shirt (that I had no control over... it was the committee shirt), olive shorts? I was not getting dressed in the dark, so that should never have happened.

4. White crew socks, brown hiking boots with that same turquoise shirt and olive shorts. Even worse.

5. How many things can I possibly attach to my body and clothing?

6. Can you tell that I am also wearing sunglasses with that outfit? All of this is resurfacing like a bad, repressed memory.

I have several quite stylish friends who will probably have a hard time forgiving me once they see this picture. They will say that years of hard work and training were clearly lost.

I will say, to redeem myself even a teeny bit, that I work for the American Cancer Society. Those pasty white legs are proof that I'm living up to our cancer prevention standards. There. I'm at least good at my job, even if I look like a nightmare doing it.