What You Look Like When You're Busted

A girl came up to my register today with a couple of items and a bottle of beer. Typically, I'll ask for ID, ring up the alcohol, hit "no" when it says "ID required?" and continue to ring up the rest of their groceries while they pull out their ID. Only once before have I had to get a manager to take the alcohol off after the fact, when a girl only had her school ID and didn't have anything government issued.

Today's girl looked young (we're supposed to card if they look under 30) and when I asked for her ID, she pulled out an interim license, basically a piece of cardstock from the DMV that says "we're printing her license, this can be used for a little while to drive." I only recognized it because I had such a piece of paper myself a few months ago when I relinquished my expired California driver's license for a New York one.

"I lost my card," she says, "so they gave me this one until my new one comes." I felt somewhat sympathetic, since I had been through the same thing myself and had to carry around my passport for a long time before I finally got my new license. I looked at the birthdate, 10/29/82.

"Do you have anything with a picture?" I asked. She answered no. I looked at her face, to see if I might just take her word for it that she was over twenty-one, just this once (had I been thinking clearly I would have realized an '82 birthdate would have made her not just over twenty-one but two years older than me, which she definitely didn't look). I went ahead and nodded at her, passing the interim license back to her, but then noticed she was paying with a card.

"Anything with your name on it? What about that card?"

"No, it's my parents' card so it doesn't even have my name on it," she said. This was fishy to begin with, and THAT started to set off alarm bells.

"What's your birthdate?" I asked her again.

"'82," she said.

"Your birthdate."

"...October..."

"October...?" I pressed.

"...15th..."

"THAT's not your ID," I said. Her face here was difficult to describe. I don't really know what I was expecting - I guess in afterschool special land it would have been a "shucks, now I can't impress that girl/guy" or "how can I bluff my way out of this?" Instead, it was a still moment, a held breath, and I realize now that I think she was mostly just mildly afraid she was going to get into some kind of trouble.

"You used someone else's card?" I put it to her, and she nodded. I was trying to sound gentle, my voice coming out like it was somehow unfortunate for both of us that she'd been caught. Niether the question nor the response was necessary, but I suppose I was trying to sound like we were one the same side, as though "nice try, kid" would be less scary than "YOU SUCK, SURPRISING NO ONE." Kind of funny how quickly she nodded, too, ready to 'fess up to receive a lighter sentence. "I can't sell you this," I said, holding up the beer, and literally that is the fullest extent of whatever I could have done to her. I guess I could have been mean to her, too - I mean, if you're going to use someone else's interim license to try and score booze you could at least put in the effort of memorizing your supposed birthdate - but it didn't occur to me. Technically, I'd done wrong, too, by being ready to let it go to the extent that, if you wanted to get nitpicky about it, I'd already sold it to her (her payment had gone through at this point though the bottle was still in my hands).

"I'll have to do a return," I told her, and waved a manager over. I said that we needed to do a return and just didn't bring up why. The girl ran her card through and then sped away, not huffy (believe me, I've had enough customers to recognize huffy) but something else. Perhaps embarrassed.

There are a couple of things that stick with me about this interaction. One, I've almost never been in a position to have someone look at me the way that girl did today. I've avoided children at all costs, so I've never been the regulator, and even when I've been responsible for a group of peers (I can only think of costume shop contexts), I've never been in a position to get anyone in any kind of trouble. I can remember being in the "oh crap" position, of course - when caught lying as a kid all the way up to not being sure if I'd heard some instructions correctly during a workshop with the Pig Iron director and getting called out for it - and it's so strange to see it from the other side.

The other thing is that the kind of energy this girl gave off is almost impossible to reproduce. The abovementioned workshop with Pig Iron was all about being natural and truly "doing nothing" on stage without performing some kind of "look, look, look how natural I'm being!" The specific incident I refer to above involved not being sure if he'd said it was okay to enter from the same side as someone who'd just entered, being ready to enter and then sort of wavering at the very peak of entering and deciding not to take the risk, and having the director call out, "WHAT are you DOING, Holly?!" and then having me try to recreate exactly the moment of doing but not doing something, in front of everybody. If we could harness that energy, he said, and actually recreate those moments that happen every day, we'd all be the best actors in the entire world. Or something to that effect.

So anyone that's ever had to play "busted," on stage or screen has never been truly successful, as far as I've seen. That doesn't mean no one's a good actor, just that the exact freshness or uniqueness, the Reality of a true moment that happens in real life, is very nearly if not totally impossible to reproduce. That makes me kind of happy; both because there is a reason that real life is in fact, real and that there is a difference between it and art; and because attempting to mask or erase that difference is what we all strive for as actors, isn't it?

Just something to shoot for.