Fred's Foto Funeral.

There comes a time in your adult life where you suddenly realize you're going to more funerals and wakes than to weddings and baby showers. If the funerals and wakes are all for people your age or younger, then you've really hit a milestone. But no, in middle age your friends are settled in; then elderly relatives and those of friends start to pass into the great beyond. So, you go to a lot of funerals and wakes.

You almost never go to a wake anymore that they don't have a collection of photos of the deceased, enjoying life and not being deceased. They may be posted on boards or displayed on a video loop, but it usually is put together with the idea of giving a measure of the deceased's life. And that's nice. Also very interesting, if you only knew the person as an old-timer.

"Wow! He looked like that when he was young?"

"Wow! He was actually young?"

"Wow! They had cameras then?"

My feeling is, we're all gonna go sometime---why wait? I mean, why wait to pick the photos you want shown. Not why wait to die. I can wait to die. Taking care of my photo selection is one less thing for my loved ones to organize, assuming I don't outlive them all.

So here's some preliminary selections from my album, just to give you a taste of what you'll see at my sendoff---we're going to put the fun back in funeral.

As a baby, I was a well-known nudist in the neighborhood.

Yeah, on the sand in my disco days. Gosh, if those beach blankets could talk...

Never did find a mustache that really worked for me.

Macy's, getting ready for Black Friday. 

I forgot about the Fred Fro! The ladies all went wild. Not pleased, just wild.

My agent was happy about my first nonfiction title.

Went on TV to plug it...

The balloon didn't generate sales the way we'd hoped.

Finally, what we hope will be the ultimate Fred destination. Lemme in, Pete!

Say, I just realized there's no pictures of loved ones with me in these shots. What could that mean?