How To Take Photos in a Photo Booth

First, you must cram in. Like everything, cramming is an art. There is one stool and two of you. Figure out how two people should share this seat in an appropriate manner. Hastily pull the begrimed brown curtain shut so that no one walking past on the boardwalk will stare as you attempt to figure this out. Accuse your girlfriend of taking up all the seat. She will accuse you back of the same. Sigh, and squat. Make sure your eyes are at this level. See arrows.

There is gum wadded in the corner. There is an oily film covering the quarter slot, and in fact, every shiny surface of the machine. There are scrawlings on the wall written in Sharpie marker. “Jason wuz here.” Possibly in 1989 or possibly only yesterday. Perhaps Dana and Tommy really were “4EVER” but maybe it was only a summer thing. You have always considered yourself a realist.

Stare dumbly but earnestly into the small frame ahead. Adjust your heads accordingly. When your girlfriend accuses you of having a large head, accuse her back of the same. Remember to sit up straight. Wonder how you used to fit in here with your mother and sister anyway, every summer at the beach. And how one year, you even managed to get Dad in there, too. He was hardly in the frame, except for an eyeball and half of a mustache, but he was there.

Then you think about another photo strip, the one of just your parents in the photo booth, before you were born. They looked young then, a different kind of young. You wonder if you look young in the same way. And if one day, this might make you a little sad.

Practice. Your girlfriend will pointedly study her reflection. She smiles and relaxes, smiles and relaxes, as though she is doing a toning exercise. You threaten to pick your nose in every picture. “That will be charming,” she says. You go over your game plan. These things need a game plan. You call out the order in which you will do the faces, four miniature performances.

The first one should always be regular, normal, smiling. The second one should be silly. Whimsical. A tongue here, a furrowed brow there. The third one should be romantic. A kiss. A coy expression. A happy couple. The fourth one can be whatever. Interpretive. Pensive. Or perhaps open-mouthed and staring.

You pull three crumpled dollar bills from your pocket as well as some lint and a penny that has stuck to your sweaty palm. You insert each bill one at a time. The machine will spit the third bill back out defiantly, making its whiny little incessant machine noise. Curse—and curse well at the machine. It will listen. Insert bill again.

Get ready. Your girlfriend already is, sitting taut and comfortably on the chair. Your calve muscles will begin to burn from prolonged squatting. FLASH. Your girlfriend will adhere to the order of faces perfectly: Smile. FLASH. Tongue out. FLASH. A kiss. FLASH. Another smile, variation number two. But for you, it goes too fast. You end up making the same face all four times. It’s a sort of bewildered look.

You pile out of the booth as though emerging from a clown car. How do they get so many clowns in there, anyway? Clowns are weird. You must wait four minutes. At two minutes, you savor the anticipation, in a way that you can’t with digital cameras. At three minutes, you will begin to panic. It seems to be taking too long. What if the machine has broken? How long will you give it? Finally, the machine will spit out your photo strip as if it is relieved of it.

Your girlfriend will study it, and decide her hair looks horrible before handing it off to you. You think about how photo booths don’t really capture the present moment—not in the same way other photographs intend to. Like the one of you standing stiffly in front of the aquarium. The one of you petting a goat at the farm. The one of you telling your girlfriend not to take a picture, while she snaps it anyway mid-sentence. Present moments.

The air coming off the Atlantic Ocean is salty and cool. It blends with the smell of the boards and cotton candy and sweat. A photo booth is like a performance space for some future self. For that one day when you will say, “look at how much fun we had.”

How silly we were.
How sweet we were.
And how young.