The Old Lady at the Club

I have a secret to share with you tonight. It's something that only a few of my closest friends and family members...and several Costco employees...know. I don't photograph well. Not only that, but I especially don't photograph well for IDs. I truly seem to lose all sense of myself just before the photographer snaps the picture. I start overthinking the whole situation. Seriously. My mind starts racing. Should I smile? Should I look seductively into the camera? Should I go for that studiously serious look? Should I make duck lips?...I kid...no one should ever make duck lips. The obvious answer, at least for me, is smile. It's as simple as that. Just smile. No doubt about it, always smile. Otherwise, my ID will look like a pocket-sized mug shot. No lie. So you're probably wondering if I know I should always smile, what exactly is the problem? Again, let me remind you that I overthink these ID photos. I can't seem to help myself.

Allow me to give you a case in point. When I went back to school a few years ago to work on my master's degree, I had to get a new student ID, much to my chagrin. While standing in line behind a bunch of tight skinned pimply faced 18-year-olds at the campus ID Systems Office, I started to feel like the old lady at the club. In my mind, all those kids were staring at me as I was breaking out in my best Hammer Time moves. So I got nervous, awkwardly nervous, palpably nervous. Then it was my turn, and suddenly, my Always Smile philosophy was hiding behind The Nervous Old Lady with the Moves Like Hammer who was thinking, "I don't want to look too excited about school and have people think I'm a nerdy old lady at the club, so I 'll just look aloof and pretentious...that will make me the cool old lady at the club." Yeah that will indeed make me cool. As it turns out, my Aloof and Pretentious Cool Look strongly resembles the Deer in the Headlights Look or more accurately the Drunk Squirrel in the Headlights Look. Judge for yourself.

I suppose when the student employee asked if I would like to try that again, I should have said yes, but alas, I have years of ID photo experience to know that the second shot would not have been any better, after all, I now had his What the Heck Was That expression seared on my brain causing the Nervous Old Lady to bust out the in-case-of-emergency tootsie roll move. And that, my friends, would have been all the more embarrassing. 

No, aloof and pretentious is not better than smiling.

Going back a few years from my student ID photo shoot, I had a very similar experience at Costco. Oh, how I love Costco but oh, how I loathe my Costco ID. The photo was taken about 8 years ago, when I was at the peak of my not brief enough frumpy phase in which I looked older than I actually am now. Apparently, I thought 30 was the new 50. My Costco ID is so bad that the cashiers routinely ask if the person on my ID is shopping with me. When I inform them that the old woman in the photo and I are actually one in the same, I get some surprising and somewhat rude reactions, like asking what work I had done. One particular cashier always seems a little too excited to check my driver's license to verify my identity. I call her Deputy Fife because I know she's expecting to bust me on some gross misuse of someone else's Costco membership. I wonder, does she get a bonus for unmasking fraudulent shoppers? Does she really want to deal with the bulk size toiletries, juice boxes, and snacks that I would leave on her conveyor belt should I not actually be the Costco member? I wonder if she has really thought this through or if all the power of her handheld scanner has just gone straight to her head. The real quandary is that my driver's license doesn't look like me or my Costco ID. I seem to always leave Deputy Fife with a baffled look of disappointment on her face. I just may be the Roadrunner to her Wylie Coyote. With a little ingenuity, she just may drop that anvil on me yet.

I should get a new card made, I know, but then again, I don't need that kind of pressure in my life.