Hold It

Oh, the way things used to be!

You'll tell your grandchildren about the days when, if you saw something cool that you wanted a photo of, you had to tell the guy who just spilled a whole tray of beer, or the squirrel who looked so cute eating corn on your back porch, or the person who's just about to smack down in the pool with a belly-whopper like no one has ever seen before to wait while you ran home and grabbed the Brownie camera.

Now, that phone is out of your pocket or pockeybook before the last glass of beer hits the barroom floor, the squirrel reaches for his tiny dental floss, or Uncle Jimbo has the time to say, "Hold my beer, Cletus! Watch this rightcheer!"

And you snap and video and the whole thing is on the web before Jimbo finds his soggy t-shirt!

There was another alternative, and it's enjoying some sort of renaissance. A mainstay at every boardwalk arcade and Skee-Ball joint was always the 25 cent photobooth.  You and your friend or significant other or just yourself sat down on a tiny stool that had hosted butts since Lincoln was in Junior High, dropped in a quarter, and sat there for three snapshots that were "delivered in 3 minutes" from a little slot on the side of the booth.

The new life I spoke of is that technology has given us the ability to have portable versions of these photobooths at weddings, retirement parties, bar-and-bat mitzvahs and Quinceañeras so that attendees may remember the day by posting the picture on the front of the Kelvinator.

Another use for the photostrips? Bookmarks! People love marking their place in the latest John Grisham page turner with their vacation booth photos, and that brings us to Emma Smreker. Emma (no idea how to pronounce her last name) is from Oklahoma (OKE-la-HOME-a) goes to a half-price bookstore called Half Priced Books. One day not long ago, she was flipping through a used book and one of those strips popped out.  This is it, above.

The picture shows a young girl and an adult man mugging for the camera.  It seems like they're having a good time and everyone is there of their own volition, but Ms Smreker is on the case to return the picture.

"It's so darling.. the silly little faces they're making and everything," Smreker told KOCO-TV. "I can't imagine that someone would just willingly give that away in a book without realizing that they're losing that photo."

Emma pasted the photo array all over social media, but so far, no one has contacted her to say, "Hey! That's my uncle Nabob and me at Sunova Beach last summer!"

If you recognize these two, you know what to do.  Because I don't.