PLS 2019: Chidsey

Back in January I made a resolution/goal/blood oath to shoot an informal portrait every time I have lunch with a friend in 2019. It seemed like kind of a fun way to use my photography to build something with a little more meaning than my usual assortment of sunsets and natural wonders. Anyway, it’s been a fun project, and today I officially want to start sharing the results. My first subject/victim is my longtime friend and associate Chidsey, the mastermind behind @sqwakdotcom . We’ve been friends ever since he started showing up late to my parties back in 2007 to talk pop culture long after most of the other guests had gone. In the time since we’ve worked together on a variety of projects, including a couple of different sketch comedy websites and my YouTube movie review channel, and he was kind enough to meet me at my favorite Peruvian restaurant in Bountiful to kick off this one, probably because he still feels guilty for making me appear on America’s Got Talent with him five years ago. Bless his heart, he even wore his Notorious RBG t-shirt just for the occasion.

PLS 2019: BretO

The grocery store where we met and worked together as teenagers was officially turned to rubble a few weeks ago, but BretO and I have shared more than enough adventures in the years since to offset any puny residential development efforts. Nowadays his paychecks come from a gig as the Special Needs Coordinator for Seminaries and Institutes in Davis County, which anyone who knows him will tell you is a perfect match for his personality. Aside from teaching, he also shares my love of photography, and plays a wicked bass when I can nag our band away from life’s more adult responsibilities. We met up for lunch at Smokin’ Bones BBQ to catch up on old times, present times, and future times, and he consented to be part of this little portrait project of mine. It was another fun encounter on a list that goes back a long way now, even if the dry ice bin where he first tried to talk me into selling him all my old Star Wars toys is vanished into history.

PLS 2019: Tyler

There is only one man I know who could convince eight clear-thinking fully grown adults (including yours truly) to pile onto a giant inflatable unicorn pool toy for a picture. Check that; I know a few people who could talk eight people into doing that, but I only know one who would buy the giant inflatable unicorn pool toy with the express purpose of creating such an opportunity. Tyler is that man. He is, undoubtedly, the life of the party. I met Tyler during my third and final stint at the University 32nd Ward (RIP), and over the course of my post-YSA life, we have shared many adventures, whether seeing excellent concerts (Ok Go!), coaching each other through gym workouts, or, during one memorable year, becoming first-time uncles only days apart. These days Tyler is a Promotions Campaign Manager for the good people at @overstock , which you may have gathered by his stylish t-shirt/blazer combo, and you can frequently catch him performing improv comedy on Friday nights at the Bountiful Davis Arts Center. We dropped by Yi Sushi in Midvale for lunch a while back, not far from his Overstock office. As you might guess, he was happy to grant me a picture for my project.

PLS 2019: Nathan

About six months into my LDS mission, as spring was just turning to summer, I was transferred out to a little town in northwest Illinois surrounded by rolling hills and cornfields. Freeport was about as far from Chicago as you could get within mission boundaries, but it eventually became one of my favorite areas. A big part of that is because of all the great people I got to know while I was there, including my friend Nathan, pictured here. Nathan’s family were members of the local Freeport Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and lived outside of town on a farm that, as I recall, had a huge barn with a half pipe for skating inside. These days Nathan and his siblings have pretty much all grown up and spread out around the country, but his parents are still there, though I have no word on if they’re using the half pipe. He and I recently had the chance to catch up out at an Apollo Burger in Salt Lake, where he told me about the new counseling job with the National Guard that has brought his own young family out to Utah, and I explained how Apollo Burger, Crown Burgers, and Atlantis Burger are all interconnected as part of a vast and tasty burger conspiracy. Naturally, an impromptu power lunch portrait was part of a fun visit.

PLS 2019: The Cheetahman

There were no re-enactments of old Monty Python sketches during my first visit to the new @slapfish in Station Park back in February, but if I had really wanted to re-create the iconic “Fish-Slapping Dance” for a few bemused customers, my company would have been eminently qualified. Randy and I first became friends in Viewmont High School’s Little Theater, where we performed together in “Arsenic and Old Lace” my senior year. Since then, we’ve built an extensive shared resume that includes everything from outdoorsy road trips to bowling alley band gigs to a watershed calorie counting challenge, with innumerable power lunches like this one in-between. Yet of all the memories, few top him dragging me out of my house at the tail end of one of the lousiest nights of my life (yes, it involved a girl) to throw a football around the front lawn of the Bountiful Tabernacle. Around that time he was still selling pagers to the Davis County jet set, but these days Randy’s entrepreneurial spirit has been channeled into his line of Rockagator waterproof backpacks. The comparatively young venture has taken him all over the western United States, towing a trailer full of sleek product ready for outdoors expos, and thanks to the contacts he’s made along the way, his reach will extend into Europe by later this year. It’s an appropriately proactive effort for an enterprising family man who is used to spending time a little time on stages.

PLS 2019: Dr. Josh

In September of 2000, I flew down to Texas to see The Who play a show in the Woodlands Pavilion, just north of Houston. My partner-in-classic rock, and the brains behind the operation, was a relatively new friend and fellow Who fan who was a year into chiropractic school in Dallas at the time. The concert was great, but it was on the road back to Dallas, during a late night conversation about the deeper things in life, that I understood I was with a true kindred spirit. I knew of Josh for a long time before I met him myself. We had mutual friends and attended the same junior high and high school growing up, but didn’t really connect until after we’d returned from our LDS missions and started attending a singles ward up at the University of Utah. These days, Josh runs a successful chiropractic practice in Farmington, and lucky for me, will still make time for a concert, a movie night, or to to duck over to Station Park and grab lunch with his now old friend(even if that friend makes him pose for a picture in Habit Burger as a result). The love of music is still there—last year Josh came along for my press screening of “Bohemian Rhapsody”—but as is usually the case, the best encore was the insightful conversation that resonated long after the show was over.

PLS 2019: Brian

For Brian and I, the road to friendship started in Mr. McClurg’s seventh grade science class at Centerville Junior High. It picked up steam in the refining fires of Viewmont High School’s sophomore football program, and hit its stride as we patrolled the front end of the Centerville Dick’s Market, bagging groceries and looking ahead to college and our LDS missions. Brian has been an awesome friend for many years, but interestingly he has also been at the cutting edge of my technological growth. During our first year of college, while home from Utah State for the weekend, he dragged me up to a University of Utah computer lab and demanded that I get my first email address, apparently so he could send me the entire lyrics to Stairway to Heaven, transcribed entirely from memory. A few years later, he showed me the personal web page he’d put together for a USU business class, and my eyes widened at the idea that a friend of mine could have an actual presence on the Internet. These days Brian is still making connections, now for the good people of Ancestry.com. And even though he and his family vanished into the exotic vortex of Utah County long ago, I still get to see him often. For his lunch portrait I insisted that we go to the Lehi JCW Burger Boys, because I always insist that we go to the Lehi JCW Burger Boys whenever I get within 30 miles of the place, and am just grateful that I have a patient and dedicated friend who is willing to put up with my unhealthy obsession with JCW’s Jalapeño Bacon Burger. I guess once you’re far enough down the road of friendship, you can put up with a few eccentricities.

PLS 2019: Zach

If terrorists ever imprisoned my friend Zach in a remote cave in the desert, he’d probably build himself an Iron Man suit and fight his way to freedom. Or at least he’d remodel the cave and move the kitchen to a more sensible position. Zach is one of those highly constructive guys who makes me feel like I need to be doing more manly stuff. He remodels homes, he builds hot rods, and he’s raising a great family. He’s also one of those guys who shows up for every neighborhood move-in or service project, usually with a couple of his kids along for the ride in his black truck. Zach’s positive, can-do attitude has been obvious ever since I met him and his brother Duke in the foyer outside a 19th Ward sacrament meeting four years ago, and I’ve seen it over and over in the time since as we’ve served together in the Young Men’s presidency and the Elders Quorum presidency. As he’s showed me around a couple of homes he’s remodeled in our neighborhood in recent years, pointing out how he’s redesigned rooms and walls and all the stuff you see and don’t see in a house, I’ve admired the way Zach sees the potential in something and works to realize his vision. A lot of people have great ideas; not as many have the follow-through to make them a reality.

PLS 2019: Jared

A fairly long time ago in a now-defunct singles ward about a half hour’s drive away, I met a kindred spirit named Jared. We became fast friends, and spent the years to come attending parties and ward activities, watching movies and TV shows, and discussing the weightier things in life everywhere from the local XCel Fitness (also defunct), to a cabin in Island Park, to a fan line at Salt Lake’s first Comic-Con (not defunct, but renamed for legal reasons) as we waited to meet the guy who played Darth Maul in Phantom Menace. Along the way, Jared proved himself as talented a friend as he is an illustrator, a go-to guy whether you had backed yourself into a wall socially or with a creative project that needed some actual expertise. A few weeks ago in a Five Guys about five minutes away, I met Jared to catch up over a burger and some Cajun fries. Life has changed in many ways since our YSA days—Jared is a happily married man, for one—but the pop culture passion is unchanged. A lengthy graphic design career has led him to Wilson Electronics, but he still has time to offer some expertise to an old friend who’s wrestling with a photo project, and he’s still a walking Star Wars encyclopedia who has seen U2 in concert enough times that Bono should probably name the band’s next album after him...and let him design the cover, too. (My recommendation? “Achtung Adams.”)

PLS 2019: Tanner

I think I’ve known Tanner just long enough now to start calling him an “old friend,” especially since, like with so many friends who have been part of this project, the roots of that relationship involve a business that no longer exists. I first got to know the World’s Greatest Superman Fan during a series of group YSA excursions to the old Happy Sumo at the Gateway Mall in Salt Lake City several years ago. But while the Gateway location closed and many of the people involved have been scattered to the four winds, my friendship with Tanner has rolled along, thanks to common interests in movies, food, and a shared determination to fight back the advance of mortality at our local VASA Fitness. These days, when he’s not battering an elliptical machine into cardio submission, or getting reps as a rookie dad alongside his wife Courtney, he’s channeling his love of Superman and DC and movies in general into his work for Argenta Home Theaters. I keep telling him one of these days I’m going to be his client. Tanner was happy to oblige me with a quick portrait during a recent lunch at The Bayou out in Salt Lake, but it’s really just a stand-in for the image of him I’ll always remember best. When photography becomes a significant part of your life, you start noticing the pictures you don’t take, either because you didn’t have a camera handy or you wisely just chose to live in the moment. Five years ago, attending Tanner’s baptism was one of those moments. Part of me wishes I’d had a camera to capture the sight of him hugging his dad in the font after he came up out of the water, but something tells me it was a better moment to record in my mind. Certain memories are better kept on different hard drives.

PLS 2019: Scott

This is the face of a man who is about to finish graduate school. Impressive, because I don’t remember smiling until after finishing my own MS years ago, but not surprising, because in the short time I’ve known Scott since he and his wife Ashley moved into the neighborhood, he’s always maintained a positive disposition. When Scott and I met up for lunch at Yoshi’s in Murray a while back, he was just finishing up his Masters of Real Estate Development at the University of Utah. He works in commercial real estate in Salt Lake, but it was his travels outside of the state that most interested me. He and Ashley are quite the intrepid travelers, and after seeing the highlight video they put together from a trip to Iceland last year, I convinced him to meet up and break down his planning process with me, since Iceland is pretty high on my “to-do” list. Actually, “convinced” isn’t really the best word, since Scott is clearly a very generous person (case in point: he and Ashley are managing the Bountiful North Stake’s Youth Conference as I type this). He’s also a fan of grunge rock, as I discovered during a wide-ranging and insightful conversation. I wouldn’t have guessed it—probably due to his lack of flannel or sense of existential angst—but it was a surprising addition to an impressive and well-rounded resume.

PLS 2019: Cherenia

I was on splits with Elder Mike Heaps one night in the spring, only a couple of streets over from our south side apartment, when we knocked on a random door and met my friend Cherenia for the first time. She must have been a little skeptical of those crazy Utah boys, but in the weeks to follow we became fast friends. In the years since my time in Chicago, many connections have grown thin, but thanks to a combination of factors (and here I must mention the annual Christmas cards from Cherenia’s mom, who frequently had my fellow missionaries and I over for dinner), our friendship has remained strong. Any visit to the Windy City—and thankfully there have been many—will include some quality time catching up and talking about life’s various pursuits. Speaking of which, during a quick visit last April, we met up for lunch at Chicago’s Greek Kitchen, and Cherenia told me about her exciting ventures into the world of real estate. If she attacks it with any of the sunny, entrepreneurial spirit she’s demonstrated over the years, it’s bound to be a big success.

Road Weary Cheetahman

For most of my power lunch portraits, the story was the subject itself, the friend or family member I was capturing for posterity. But in April of 2019, my portrait of longtime friend Randy came with some memorable context. By the time I took his photograph in a Cheyenne restaurant, we had been on the road for more than two days, returning from the NRA convention where Randy had been selling waterproof backpacks for three more days. Our intention had been to finish the journey home that day, but as we drove north from Denver to Cheyenne, we were greeted with a whiteout blizzard that threatened to extend our trip a final night. At the end of such a long journey and so close to home, the prospect of a final delay inspired the million mile look in Randy's eyes. Luckily, the storm broke by the end of our meal, and we were both home safe by that night.

PLS 2019: Vaughn

Like many people, I have a way of associating my friends with certain phases in my life. I’ve known Vaughn since at least junior high, when we were in the same French class with Madame Sharp, and later we worked on the newspaper staff together in high school. But I associate our friendship with the time we spent in the University 32nd ward, specifically during a stretch when we were both done with our bachelors degrees, still a year or two out from grad school, and wondering what to make of jobs that generally paid the bills, but didn’t feel like where we were supposed to be. It was a tough stretch on many levels, and it helped to work through it with such a kindred spirit (a spring temple trip to St. George in the middle of that run remains a fond and vital memory for both of us). In time, we made it to our “next stages,“ which in Vaughn’s case included a couple of years in my old mission stomping grounds, attending Northwestern University in Chicago’s near north suburbs while I wrote for his old student paper at Utah State. But whatever stage we’ve encountered in the time since, it’s always built on that friendship, whether playing pickup basketball in Woods Cross or catching up over lunches like our recent get-together at Charlie Chow’s a few weeks back. As we waited for our food, Vaughn delivered the unsurprising news that he’d been called as bishop in his Farmington ward, and we talked about how he was integrating his new responsibilities with life as a husband and father, and his daytime hours in marketing communication (another common intersection from our past). He’s come a long way from our conversations in the YSA era, and I’m sure the people in his ward are enjoying the benefits of his experience.

PLS 2019: Steve

There aren’t too many people in this world who have known me longer than this guy, and it’s crazy to think of how much the world has changed since we met the summer before we started kindergarten. Steve and I have shared quite the resume over the years. He was with me the first time I saw “Return of the Jedi,” the first time I played church basketball (“played” being a relative term at age 11), and the first (and only) time I saw James Brown in concert. Even after he moved to Cedar City to go to school and Las Vegas to start a family, I have continued to hound his life at every turn. Maybe it’s the resignation to this fact that brought him back to Davis County with his wife and six kids (and now one new dog!), where in a move of cosmic harmony that deserves its own Elton John song, we have somehow wound up across the street from each other again after all these years (though to be fair, teenage Steve would have preferred a tune from Van Halen). Now that the proper order of the universe has been restored (insert “Endgame” joke here), Steve is spending his time being an awesome dad and husband, driving electric cars, making buildings all over the country look sleek and cool, and in yet another move of cosmic grace, teaching primary kids on the weekends, just like his bald neighbor. We got together for lunch earlier this year, but even though we enjoyed some excellent sushi, we wound up in a dark booth that didn’t give me the quality portrait my longtime friend deserved. So I demanded we try again, and about a week ago, we got together to try out a cool Mexican restaurant in Salt Lake called Alamexo, where a bright picture window helped me do justice to a man I have known since I was four years old.

PLS 2019: Kent

It’s always been fun for me to realize how my life’s path has steered near a future friend, years before we would actually meet. For a few months before I set out as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at age 19, I ran camera and TelePrompTer on the 6pm and 10pm broadcasts for KSL TV. Across the newsroom, my future neighbor, friend, and fellow sports enthusiast Kent was doing broadcasts for KSL radio. We didn’t meet until years later, when we both wound up serving in the young men’s program in our ward, but our shared professional history didn’t emerge until just a few weeks ago as we had lunch out at the Red Iguana 2 in Salt Lake City. Over my go-to Red Iguana entree—we both had the Chile Verde platter—we talked about jobs and life and missions, and we laughed about how we used to wake up at insanely early hours to do temple baptisms with the youth while we were still in the young men’s presidency. We spent quality time discussing our love of pro sports (including a shared appreciation of former Seahawks wide receiver Steve Largent), and Kent explained his love for the city of Seattle, which is closely connected to the story of how he met his wife. After many years in the broadcast field, Kent has made a pretty dramatic career change, and now works in residential real estate for the same church that made us primary teachers after our release from the young men’s program. Whatever he’s doing, you can be assured that Kent is doing it with the same enthusiasm you can sense behind that smile. It all makes me wonder what future friend is living life nearby, working out at the same gym, or sitting in a class across the hall. Even if they don’t appreciate Steve Largent, I hope they at least like Chile Verde.

PLS 2019: Jeff

There might have been a wee bit of tension in the air back in the fall of 2010, when this new guy named Jeff joined the band. After all, having a shaved head was MY thing, and this guy didn’t seem to like Neil Diamond AT ALL. But it didn’t take long to figure out that Jeff was both an excellent addition to the band—which was exclusively gigging at charter schools back in those days—and a kindred spirit of rare quality. Jeff is one of those guys that makes you feel like you need to work a little harder on your man card; he’s a world traveler who rides motorcycles, plays guitar, knows—and teaches—all kinds of stuff about guns (and gun safety), and he handles a solid beard. And yes, he shaves his head. He’d be a great guy to have around for a zombie apocalypse, and conveniently, he also digs zombie movies. He’s a multi-media guru, and recently started down that dark, hopeless path into serious photography. (Just remember, my friend, it’s all downhill from here.) If our friendship were only built on band stuff, I’d have plenty of bio material after years of practices and random gigs in odd and obscure places. But as with most genuine friendships, the best memories usually recall long conversations about important and not-so-important subjects, late at night in places like In-N-Out Burger or my old apartment loft. Case in point: our power lunch at @blueplatediner a few weeks back started at a reasonable hour, but the conversation lasted long enough that we could have ordered dinner by the end of it. Now if we could just take care of the Neil Diamond thing...

PLS 2019: Micah

The easiest way to put this is that Micah is to New York as I am to Chicago. But as usual, the easiest option fails to do justice to a dynamic friendship that has lasted close to two decades, and has made a substantial impact on my own career. I met Micah during the Parker Era of the University 32nd Ward, back when we were meeting in this funny old chapel on 1st South in Salt Lake City. As time and many, many activities passed—including a memorable road trip to the Manti Pageant (RIP) one summer—we became both friends and colleagues, largely thanks to the mysterious enigma that is the Sunday School program. During the same stretch, I watched as NBA basketball became the professional focal point of Micah’s existence, when after years of service at The Delta Center (which snagged me my first opportunity to photograph a Jazz game), he eventually moved to the Big Apple to raise his growing family while working in the league offices. The NBA job has taken Micah all around the world, but I caught him as he passed through town recently, and we grabbed lunch at @granatos.1948 , which was really the only option if you know him at all. He told me all about his recent experiences as a bishop in Harlem, which also feels appropriate, and though I remember saying words, I can’t remember what I contributed to the discussion outside of the impromptu portrait session. Back in 2010, Micah gave me the tip that led to me helming the Deseret News’ film reviews, and provided me with an easy conversation starter at parties for years to come. It’s just one example of trademark generosity from my #1 New Yorker.

PLS 2019: Katie

It might not be obvious, given that she has hair and a refined sense of style, but this week I’m featuring my sister Katie. Happy Birthday, punk! Good grief, where do I even start? When you’ve known somebody from the time they were literally brought home from the hospital, the memories tend to run together. For years, I treated my kid sister like a Mini-Me, wrapping her up in pillows so we could play full-contact football in our unfinished basement, or sending her lists of songs to listen to while I was on my mission to ensure she had a proper musical upbringing. The 5 1/2 year gap between us meant we were never quite in the same school at the same time—aside from our Kindergarten/6th grade year—and it took an embarrassingly long time before I started to really appreciate the young woman who used to walk around our house singing while I was clinging to delusions of Super Bowl rings. Now of course she’s this dynamo kaleidoscope of activity: dedicated wife and mother, accomplished singer, next-level gift giver, thoughtful poet, teacher, baker, decorator, dresser...and after our recent power lunch at Oh Mai in Salt Lake, I’d say she’s got a talent for spotting excellent food options, as well. Yet there’s one dynamic that seems to define our relationship as much as anything, that springs to mind as I remember a night up in Island Park when we were kids, staying with our grandparents. She was having a rough time, missing home, and I had to be the one to give her a pep talk and let her know things would be OK. It made me feel like I was a good big brother, and it’s humbling to think of how often I go to her for advice now, how those roles have reversed. I see how she is with my brother-in-law, how she is with my nieces, and I feel silly that I ever tried to make her more like me. She was always on the right track all along.

PLS 2019: Jon

My history with the Cox family goes back a long way. Before holding positions with SUU and BYU, Neil Cox was my mission president out in Chicago. A few years after I got home, Neil’s son Chad and I served in a YSA ward Elders Quorum Presidency before he left for med school. Though we were both in Chicago at the same time—and thus bear the shared experience of being Jazz fans in Illinois during Utah’s NBA Finals runs—I didn’t get to know Chad’s younger brother Jon until after my own grad school experience, when we were both knocking around the YSA scene. Jon combined an outgoing personality with some creative ingenuity, which led to me photographing an event he called the 4.01K, which required participants to run through downtown Salt Lake City in full business attire. Around that time, Jon was working for the former Senator Bob Bennett, and collecting the anecdotes and observations he’d eventually compile into his new book, “Utah Politics: Principles, Theories, and Rules of the Game.” I insisted that Jon meet me for lunch so I could get a personal dedication in my copy of his book, so we met at the Chunga’s out in Redwood Road and caught up one recent afternoon. After leaving Senator Bennett’s office, Jon spent some time in the world of academia down in Ephraim, served as a state representative, got married, and eventually landed at Rocky Mountain Power, where he currently works as Vice President of Government Affairs. Grown-up life aside, I’m crossing my fingers that in the near future, he’ll brainstorm a photo-worthy event to match the 4.01K. Judging by what I’m reading in “Utah Politics,” those creative juices are still flowing.

PLS 2019: Kirk

One of the more interesting aspects of returning to the ward I grew up in has been getting to know people as an adult that I previously only knew from a kid’s perspective. Kirk and his family moved into my ward sometime when I was in my early teens, and he became a family friend right away. He was a counselor in the bishopric around the time I set out for the world of YSA wards, so I was gone by the time he was formally called as bishop, but he was always one of the guys I enjoyed catching up with whenever I’d come back for a visit. Now, of course, the dynamic is a little different, though Kirk hasn’t changed at all. It’s been great fun over the last couple of years to talk movies on many occasions, either in the hall after sacrament meeting or before a press screening in Salt Lake—Kirk is a big enough movie guy that he’s done some freelance Uber work during Sundance—but beyond that, he’s just the kind of guy who gives you the sense that he’s looking out for you. While I was away from the ward, especially while my dad’s health was declining, it was reassuring to know that guys like Kirk were there in the neighborhood. A few weeks back, we dropped by the Sushi Monster at Station Park to talk movies and music and career and such—Kirk works as a Senior Account Executive for Taylor Communications. It’s good to have a shared love of sushi to add to the friendship, and to know he’s not the kind of guy to hold my awkward teen years against me.

PLS 2019: Dave

As I’ve been doing my little profile series this year, it’s been fun to consider the plot of each friendship. In some cases I met friends and started hanging out immediately. With others we were acquaintances for years before having any meaningful interaction. I’ve known one of my regular “gym friends” since the second grade, but we barely interacted at all between the third grade and our thirties. I met Dave during a brief stretch of my YSA days up at the University of Utah, in the heyday of the University 32nd Ward. I remember him being a highlight of the Elders Quorum instructor rotation, combining dry wit with spiritual insight, which I appreciated as a fellow teacher. We knew each other well enough to know who the other one was, but that was about the extent of it. Dave then got married, vanishing from the YSA radar, and that was it. Fast-forward a few years, and there’s Dave again, now with a family and, appropriately enough, attending my family ward. He’s still combining humor and spirituality—this time as a Sunday School teacher—but now we’re playing softball together (anyone who knows Dave knows he’s a huge baseball guy), and I’m hearing all about his exploits in documentary filmmaking. Later we’re serving in the Elders Quorum together, playing church basketball together—he favors the three-ball—and once our friendship becomes legally certified on Facebook, I learn that he’s got a knack for celebrity sharpie portraits. The moral of the story? People come in and out of our lives at unexpected times, and you never know who you might wind up meeting to eat breakfast food for lunch with someday.

PLS 2019: John

When I think about it, 2008 was a lousy year in a lot of ways. By the end of it, I’d lost two grandparents, a job, and I even got kicked out of my singles ward. And like a lot of people, my investment efforts blew up in my face (at least temporarily—keep a long term perspective!). Yet for all the hassles and challenges, the best thing I remember about 2008 was my sister getting married, which officially made John my brother-in-law. By the time John married Katie, he’d already had a long history with my family. He grew up next door to my grandparents in Farmington, and had been a family friend for years before he and my sister started dating seriously. In fact, John and I were roommates for almost two years in the middle of it all. How many guys can say they lived with their future brother-in-law? For all the good times we enjoyed throwing parties and holding group dates at the house on 1200 south, and taking yearly excursions up to the cabin in Island Park, things just got better after John and Katie got married. My great roommate is a great brother-in-law, but he’s an even better husband and father, not to mention a dedicated priesthood holder, and I’ve especially enjoyed being a part of the family he and Katie are building (even if that means letting him choose a new and risky option for his birthday dinner every year). They gave me something to pin my hopes on back in 2008, and have continued to deliver ever since.

PLS 2019: Ben

Whenever I have Ben on my lunch schedule, I know I will laugh. We met in the flannel-clad haze of the early 90s, slogging away bagging groceries for Dick’s Market in a kind of psycho-social high school wonderland. Teenage jobs rarely make a lot of sense, and so it was always good to have Ben around to share the madness. As I got to know Ben better, I quickly realized that he was far more than a sarcastic and quick-witted fellow bagger. He was a performer of various forms, doing musical theater and improv, and his keen taste in writing eventually convinced me to read Woody Allen for the first time. There were group dates and late night hangouts, and a memorable excursion to Yellowstone where Ben forgot to bring a sleeping bag. Eventually we moved on from Dick’s, served missions, and went to college. Ben went legit, getting married, going to law school, having a family. But we kept in touch, mostly in the form of the kind of lunches that helped to inspire this portrait project. These days our hair may be thinner (OK, pretty much gone), and our beards grayer. Ben even has a Clark Kent job for the state AG. But just like back when we spent our afternoons in red nylon aprons, I know I have a go-to man when I need a laugh and a little perspective on the madness of it all.