Smile for the birdie: quick shots in the Bryan Center Photo: Jon Gardiner

"Can we all get in?" Dipersia nodded. They dropped their purses, lifted the curtain, and shuffled in, two in front, two in back.

"When is it going to go?!"

"I don't know!"

"Move your head in!"

"It's about to take it!"

"Oh my God!"

"Oh my God!"

"Oh my God, it just took it!"

"Aaaaahhh!"

Dipersia called out again. "Free photos!" Pike walked down the hall and invited employees from the McDonald's to come by. Soon a crowd had gathered, an assortment of strangers. Out of nowhere, it seemed, a sort of party had emerged. People milled about waiting for their turn in line or for their pictures to develop. Music played on a pair of speakers hooked up to an

iPod, and hors d'oeuvres, in the form of McDonald's chicken nuggets, made their way around the room. "Can I make a mean face?" asked Aaron Kirschenfeld, a senior. "You can make any kind of face you want," said Dipersia.

"This is a family tradition. I have a bunch of these of my kids and me on my file cabinet," said Mary Creason, a lecturer in physics. "Dang," she said, looking at the photos she'd just taken. "They gave me bunny ears."

Wil Weldon '96, an instructor in film and video, was on his way to a film-editing workshop in the basement of the Bryan Center. "I think I may have seen one other photo booth in the entire state," said the Thomasville, North Carolina, native. "It's art in progress. It's staged and it's contrived. But with four photographs, you capture something happening between the first and the last--something totally spontaneous."

Pike looked on with amusement. He seemed pleased. The booth was working, and not just in the mechanical sense. It was bringing a community together. There had been moments like this before, he said. Like the time seven Turkish students packed in all at once. "That's the record," he said. Or the time President Keohane dropped in for a visit. "We were like, 'You wanna get in?' And she got in!" Or the time Pike left the key in the booth and rushed back to get it at two a.m.

"I was getting ready for bed. And I remembered I left the key. And I was worried somebody might steal the money inside. So I threw on my clothes and drove to the Bryan Center. I run down the stairs, and, just as I get there, I see these two people getting out of the booth. It's a police officer and a security guard. I'm like, 'Is my key still in there?' They're kind of startled, and the policeman says, 'Uh. Yeah, yeah. We were--I just got a call that somebody left a, uh, a key. We were ... checking it out.' And as they're standing there explaining this, a strip falls out of the machine.

"In the first picture, they look pretty confused. But after the flash goes off, they realize what they've done. In the second one, they're looking at each other and sort of grinning. And by the fourth picture, they're laughing hysterically. They're both facing the camera--these two strangers--and they're smiling, with their arms over each other's shoulders, and I think they just figured, 'We're stuck in here. We're stuck in this moment.' And they embraced it."