Crying Again in the Last Color Booth: Mother’s Day in Sylvan Beach

For those of you who have been reading for a while, you already know why Mother’s Day is going to be difficult.

We celebrate it on a different day in the UK, back in March, so by the time May rolls around I’ve already been sufficiently sad for a couple of months. I decided the best thing to do was to drive my entire family the 5 hours to Sylvan Beach to visit Carello’s Arcade for the beginning of their 2025 season - the last season of the color booth that has been there for 34 years.

The drive is relatively uneventful. This is Vinnie’s longest drive so far, so we tried to plan it around nap times. Still allowing for the important pitstops for food and leg stretching, we arrive the day before the arcade opens so that we aren’t rushed. We start the day the best way in Sylvan Beach, at The Pancake House (IYKYK), and then make a point to stop at the Cross Island Chapel in Oneida, which holds the record as the world’s smallest church, only accessible by boat. A smaller version of where we were married, The Church in the Sea in Aberffraw, Anglesey (it’s worth the Google image search, I promise).

What I didn’t know when we left our house for the drive, but would soon find out, was that David and Lisa don’t actually turn on the photobooths until the end of May - despite the arcade opening on Mother’s Day weekend. Can you imagine if we had driven all the way there and arrived to no booths working? Because I can’t. David, ever the most generous and gracious of hosts, turned the booth on especially for us. Of course, I’m crying again.

There are a lot of reasons Sylvan Beach has become so special for me, but the biggest reason is the relationship I’ve had with David and Lisa, their willingness to share their family history with me, and their overwhelming kindness.

We’re not just here to celebrate (celebrate feels like the wrong word here, but my words fall short) Mother’s Day, but also to take Vinnie’s first birthday portraits in the color booth. I have spent months searching and sourcing the perfect outfits for him along with the perfect backgrounds to use (because why not) and landed on the excellent combination of a terry toweling 70s romper with a giant red “1” on the front.

The backgrounds are both vintage (although let’s be honest, I brought an entire suitcase of props and backgrounds to use over the weekend we’re here). My two favourites are a circus animal print that had its first life as a bedding set, and a banner panel meant for a quilt that says “that’s our baby”. Thank you to the thrifting gods for those two perfectly timed finds.

But before we get to Vinnie’s special portraits - mom is going first. I don’t think booths will ever stop feeling like a confessional space for me. No matter whether I’ve used one the day before or the month before, when I sit on the stool and get ready to pay, I almost always take a second to sit in gratitude that I still get to experience these spaces. I’ve talked before about the connection between my grief for my mother and my grief for the loss of these machines. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why I’m holding on to them so tightly, but even with my job and the experiences I’ve been lucky to have over these past several months, I still honestly treat every one as if it’s the last time I’m going to get to do this. And in this case, with the color booth, it just might be.

David has one roll of paper and two batches of chemicals left. Who knows how long either will last, because they’ve been stored for years. Add with the fact that photobooths have obviously been going viral left, right, and centre with more influencers running booths and discovering them, this could well be the last time I manage a color strip. So I take a deep breath and savour it, in case it is.

We take a few strips each and all squeeze in for some very chaotic family portraits before I try to wrangle Vinnie for his birthday strips.

I’m not exaggerating when I say these pictures of Vinnie are possibly the best thing I have ever seen in my whole entire life. Just how lucky we are that David and Lisa made this happen, that we were able to drive here, that everything aligned. I just feel so unbelievably lucky.

We take the kids back to the Days Inn that by the end of summer will feel like a second home for me (but more on that later, of course), and I try to organise some more of my props to head back out and use the booth by myself while the kids get an early night.

Some low grade (because the high grade ones are expensive) theatrical lighting gels, my trusted printed letters, and a few different backgrounds are my weapons of choice for this evening, and I arrive back at the arcade ready to play.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the ethics of me taking a lot of color strips. I think I’ve landed somewhere in the space of: I know I’m encouraging as many people as possible to come and use the booth before the chems and paper run out, so I’m not gatekeeping to use it all myself.

With that in mind, I finish up for the evening after making a couple of pieces of work I’ve had written in notebooks since I was a teenager and head back to the hotel to help wrangle the kids for bedtime.

We start Mother’s Day again at The Pancake House before coming to use the booth, where I try to work with military precision to make some special sets of strips I tried to do in Berlin but ran out of time.

Using the letters I carry around with me, I make pieces with everyone’s name (the joke will be on me when I wait until later tonight to make my own one, and get to the arcade after David has closed for the night because I was too busy taking pictures of the sunset over the lake).

While we’re hopping in and out of the booth I meet Suzanne - who has lived in Sylvan Beach her whole life and has been using the booths here since Larry bought them in the 1990s. We chat about my silly little project and where it’s taken me, my aspirations for booths as a whole, and the fate of the color booth at the arcade. She immediately takes my number and tells me she has so many strips to show me (including original ones when the booth was running with a 53mm camera) and that she knows other people locally who would love to show me their strips. She spends some time pointing out faces on the display of David’s black and white booth, showing me which people are local and which of them have already sadly passed away.

I also get invited to her son’s 21st birthday party BBQ in July (but I don’t manage to make it). One of my favourite parts of these adventures will always be hearing the stories of people I meet and their favourite photobooth memories, because everyone has a story.

I finish up the last couple of strips and say goodbye to David and Lisa. I tell them I don’t know if I’ll make it back again before the end of the season (spoiler: I come back in June, July, August, and their last day open on Sept 1st because of course I do), and we head to the hotel for our last night - a stack of strips sticking out of a Carello’s Carousel and Arcade branded plastic cup - the nostalgic, important souvenir.

The drive back home is largely uneventful, except for a couple of emails that (again) are going to completely change my life.

What is going on?!

Vinnie at Sylvan Beach