A Smile a Day... Can Sometimes Send the WRONG Rhetorical Message

Most of the girls in my pledge class, including myself, ventured to sunny Miami over spring break to bask a few days in the sun, taking a break from the cold and hostile State College. Of course, like all girls who have fresh new tans and lightened hair colors to show off, we staged an impromptu photoshoot while waiting for our table at the restaurant. We were smiling and looking like we were having the time of our lives, spreading that feeling to everyone around us. We took maybe one hundred pictures and were about to go inside the restaurant when a native onlooker asked my friend Courtney to take a picture of him. She gladly grabbed his camera, prepared to take a shot of him and his supposed friend in front of the palm trees. We quickly figured out that he was alone, but he didn't want a picture alone. He grabbed my friend Rachel, and everything happened so fast that we didn't even know what to do. She drug me into the shot so she didn't have to do it alone, and we even snapped a copy of the photo with her camera so we could remember our encounter with the world's certifiably most creepy man. After the picture, he sniffed her hair and tried to linger a little longer, but we ran away. Of course the situation could have turned out to be much worse, and we were grateful that he didn't follow us. We knew that we would have to be more careful around strangers for the rest of the vacation-- and I learned that sometimes smiling, and all body language, can send the wrong signal to someone who's watching that you don't expect to be.

Anyway, now the picture has turned into a funny memory (although we hope this won't happen again):