Photo-Booth

The following day, the 13th of April, saw another photographic adventure: take photos in a (fun) photo booth!

Through the years I've crossed the paths of photo booths, and last year in Germany I'd used one to get ID photos taken for my visa. Never before, however, had either Kate or I used a photo booth for Amusement, Entertainment, or otherwise FUN. Change smoldered on the horizon.

Locating a photo booth was, however, no simple feat. As photo apps of the Instagram variety have spun their tendrils through American society, photo booths have, to an extent, been relegated to the past. It was time I do a bit of Learning About.

According to Photobooth.net, just four public photo booths remain active in Minnesota. Of these, one was to be found at the State Fair, which wouldn't be open nearly in time for the April 13th deadline. I enlisted the company of Taren on the adventure, and we elected to patronize the Kitty Kat Klub's tried and trusted photo booth near the U of M campus in Minneapolis.

When the doors of the Kitty Kat Klub were flung wide at 4:00pm, Taren and I entered the dim and sumptuously-decorated establishment. We headed straight for the bar.

"We heard you had a photo booth?" I said tentatively.

The bar tender directed us to the back of the room and around a corner deep into the bowels of the Klub. There, in the back, we found just what we sought.

Before entering the tiny, curtained, one-stool box, Taren unpacked a sound recorder, which we brought with us inside. We'd been recording soundscapes that week, and the sounds of a photo booth we hoped would prove unique and interesting.

Figuring out how to operate the photo booth once we'd arrived was equally adventurous. Accustomed as we are to LCD screens and immediate confirmation by machines, the simple "insert coins and sit tight" operation of the photo booth was so foreign that we weren't sure it had actually taken any pictures. Four close-spaced clicking sounds kept us optimistic, however, and we exited the photo booth to collect our promised photographs.

Nothing was there. The booth lay silent as if out of order. What had happened? Were our pictures resigned to the circuitry of this box, never to be brought to light?

After two minutes of waiting, wondering if we ought to power down the sound recorder and conserve its battery, we heard klangings and buzzes. All of a sudden, a thin sheet of four sepia pictures dropped into the tray. We cackled. It was fantastic.