Mad Props for the Booth

Last year, when my gal pal Meryl had her wedding, my friends and I had a blast hogging the photo booth.

Naturally, I wanted people to hog photo booth at my wedding! A look into the costs of renting a photo booth quickly ruled that out for our budget, so I decided to go the super DIY route and build one myself.

We borrowed a polaroid camera from our friends Sara and Tom, who'd bought one for their wedding as well, then hired our site owner's grandson to be our official booth photographer for the evening. Done and done. Now for props! A quick trip to the dollar store and into my own closet supplied some photo booth props...a princess tiara, some sunglasses procured from some film fest swag bag, a pirate's eye patch, a bunch of flowers, a hat from an acting class scene where I played Annie Hall, and some Mardi Gras beads. I also wanted a moustache, but the Howard Hughes in me needed to devise a germ-free way of pulling that off. Luckily, because of Halloween coming up, dollar stores and bodegas were awash in fake moustaches. I picked up this cheap one. Dumb thing didn't even have a sticky back. I guess kids were supposed to tape it to their skin?

Don't feel sad for me, I'm already dead.

I traced the moustache silhouette onto a piece of cardboard...

Then, using the hot glue gun, stuck a dowel rod to it, then glued the moustache to the cardboard.

Ta-da! I look like Terry Richardson, except germ-free.

I'm pretty much Tom Selleck.

As for building the booth itself, we borrowed a desk from the owner of Secluded Garden Estate to hold our props, and I bought a bunch of colored paper pom poms and crepe streamers on line, which Sara hung up between the branches of two trees to give us a backdrop. She also grabbed some flood lights from Home Depot to light up the background.

Thanks to Lynn from The Actor's Diet!

We also left our guest book at the desk so that people could snap one photo to take home, and one photo to leave with us.

At the end of the night, we got to momentarily slip away from our wedding duties (eating cake, drinking to toasts, dancing) to have a little fun with my homemade booth.

Please don't regrow that moustache.