We want to make your fridge.

Somewhere lodged between your child's first-grade drawing, your summer vacation photo, and your to-do list, is where we want to be.

The refrigerator door is America's art studio. Its patrons are the hungry, the thirsty, or the just passing-by.

The refrigerator is the home's wall of honor, the hall of fame, the place where the brilliant report card is stuck right next to the grocery list.

It's where we place special memories, and reminders for our failing memory.

And we'd like to be worthy of your refrigerator magnet.

That was one of our goals with the highly successful Cloud Catchers, in which we invite young artists to draw weather scenes for our weather page. We were hoping that once published, the proud parents would cut out their child's drawing and stick it in the kitchen for all needing a glass of milk to see.

And in today's paper, we're introducing Family Scrapbook. We're inviting our readers to send in or drop off photographs of friends, family, or even themselves.

Any local snapshot (Except for those wonderful photos of your thumb).

Any quality.

Any condition.

The photo can be from yesterday or yesteryear.

No matter.

One of our goals for becoming a great community newspaper is to publish a photo of each and every person in our circulation area. We figure, with admittedly unscientific research, we've had about 1,100 area residents pictured in The Citizen over the last six months.

But that first 1,100 is easy.

Now we're going after the rest of you.

We're eager to publish some of your favorite - or even not-so-favorite - family photographs. We want to print the picture of grandpa sleeping on the sofa, your prom date in the living room, or your family reunion group shot - minus grandpa who was sleeping on the sofa at the time.

Send us one of the duplicates of your favorite pictures that you just picked up from the photo processors. Or take a favorite photo out of your scrapbook and stop by The Citizen and have it scanned and returned.

Or, there's an even more convenient option if you'd rather not leave the comfort of your home. You can e-mail us digital pictures at citizencalendar@lee.net. We only ask that the photos contain at least one person from The Citizen readership area. But the photo itself can be from anywhere: Cayuga, Connecticut or Cancun.

We want The Citizen to better reflect the people of this community, and what better way to do that than to have photos of our readers, taken by our readers.

So we're encouraging you to take down those photos from the fridge, at least long enough to drop by The Citizen and allow us to scan them in for our new Family Scrapbook feature every Sunday.

Our goal of having every one of our readers appear in The Citizen may seem a bit far-fetched.

But not if we just added 15,000 potential photographers to our staff.

Editor Mikel LeFort can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 230 or mikel.lefort@lee.net