Tom Joyce's chamber of the bizarre

For a while now, I’ve been doing something on my personal Facebook page that a lot of my friends seem to find entertaining. Quite a few of them have suggested that I start including it on my blog, so I’ll give it a shot. You may have seen “Throwback Thursday” on Facebook, where people post old photos of themselves. I started finding random, goofy pictures on the Web — usually from the wonderful “Awkward Family Photos” — and posting them with accompanying captions for Throwback Thursday. At first, I pretended they were old photos of me. As time went on, I discarded that. Some captions I wrote in the first person, and some I didn’t. Anyway, I’m going to start sharing some of them on the blog. Since we’re coming up on Halloween, I guess I might as well start with the Halloween-themed ones. Hope you enjoy them.

In retrospect, Dad’s basic idea wasn’t so bad. New in town. Wanted to let people know about his urology practice. Since it was close to Halloween, thought that a mass-mailed brochure featuring a group picture of us in Mom’s hand-sewn costumes would be quirky and memorable, and show that he’s a family man. I guess his big mistake was trying to save on printing costs by going with a black-and-white reproduction, so people couldn’t see the orange color. Once the complaints started coming in, he went so far as to send out another mass mailing explaining that they were pumpkin costumes. But by then, it was too late. For the next few years, we were widely known throughout our town as The Scrotum Family.