Motherhood is much, much funnier than Melinda Anderson ever thought it would be. The freelance editor and writer was ready for the other stuff — the sleep deprivation, anxiety, diapers and many challenges of the first year of a child’s life — but not the potential for sheer, absolute mirth.
Case in point: One afternoon last March, shortly after her son, Anderson Moore’s, birth, Melinda’s husband, award-winning photographer John Moore, snapped a photo of him.
Something about the composition of the photo struck Melinda: With his long fingers, Anderson’s hands resembled those of Abraham Lincoln at the Memorial in Washington, DC. She juxtaposed the photo of the baby with a close-up of Lincoln’s marble hands and posted it on Instagram with the hashtag #twomoore.
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A few days later, newborn Anderson had to have a procedure to remove a skin tag on his ear. The resulting gauze bandage reminded her of one of Vincent Van Gogh’s self-portraits. She found the painting she was thinking of and posted it next to the photo of the baby.
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A week or so later, Anderson was holding his hands up while napping. “He looked like Lloyd Dobler in ‘Say Anything,’ ” notes Melinda, now living in Stamford, Conn.
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Ensuing photos referenced everything from “The Shining” and “Zoolander” to “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “Footloose” to impressionist and Renaissance art. Anderson doesn’t pose the photos; she takes the picture first and notices the resemblance afterwards. (It doesn’t hurt that she has a photographic memory and a Master’s degree in art history.)
“I try not to overthink it,” she says. “I don’t pose him and I don’t redo the picture if it doesn’t turn out well. I wouldn’t care if I posted a picture of him that was a complete mess. Because we all know that after the perfect Christmas card picture is taken, five minutes later there’s a screaming kid, a husband and wife arguing over finances and a dog that got into the sweets.”
People have started commissioning photos of their own newborns through her new Web site, twomoorephotos.com; a recent one paired a newborn with a lounging, seminude photo of Jason Alexander as George Costanza.
“Everyone says [when you have a baby] you’re still the same person, you just experience everything more,” says Melinda. “The happiest part of this is that it’s filled with joy, and I’m getting to experience humor in a much more magnified way. Who doesn’t want to laugh more?”