Photoshop this!

Of course I do not know when the word “Photoshopping” became a verb. I am way too slow and old and analog-based to keep up with the rate at which nouns like “Google” and “Photoshop” and “Youtube” become verbs in the digital universe.

I know it is true, though, because I read a story in The Times (print version) about how people who used to be married can Photoshop their exes out of old photos of them on vacation, on a cruise, in front of the Sphinx, at their wedding, and improve the memory thereby. We analog geezers used to call it “revisionizing” (yes, humans knew how to verbify nouns in the old days before 1995). An expert with an airbrush could revisionize a photo any way an editor wanted, which was useful in the Southern press any time a black wandered into a holiday shot of the mayor, the grand marshal and the Queen of the Cotton Boll sitting in a convertible. Stalin used it too, to keep himself a boyish 29 on the Kremlin reviewing stand from 1920 to 1955.

The Stalin revisionizing is so famous, in fact, that The Times, to illustrate its story, used one of those old Kremlin reviewing stand photos into which they Photoshopped someone’s Uncle Milton. I know you have seen this kind of thing before. In “Forrest Gump,” for example. But the point The Times was making is that it took professional revisionizers to keep Stalin 29 and get Forrest Gump next to JFK, whereas today in the digital universe anyone with a computer, Photoshop software, and at least two fingers, can get rid of or modify undesirables.

My attention remains with Uncle Milton though, because seeing him on the Kremlin viewing stand made me immediately think: what would be my No. 1 historical scene to Photoshop myself into, if I knew how? The answer came to me immediately, and I am reasonably confident that sharing it will not provoke Karen to Photoshop me out of our wedding pictures, which certainly would not take her long if the thought struck her. She knows Photoshopping. She can Photoshop a dog into a camel in 15 seconds.

Something funny is going on here, incidentally. As I write this with Microsoft Word (XP version, thank God), it keeps underlining "Photoshopping" as if it is a misspelling, which means Gates's code writers don't know any better than I did that Photoshop got verbified! What a nice rush of triumph on an ordinary Tuesday!

So I would Photoshop my face over Humphrey Bogart's in the hangar at the Casablanca airstrip just when he says to Ilse and Laszlo, "You better get on that plane." He loves Ilse, but he's done the thinking for both of them and he knows that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. That's what makes Rick Rick. I'm no good at being noble, but if an analog lover has to get Photoshopped, "Casablanca" is the way to go.