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.

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.