Turning 70 next month, never seen an actual kissing booth. Not at the local county fair, not at the Plant City Strawberry Festival.
The article isn’t specific, but the couple pictured in the kissing booth share a last name, so my WAG is that it’s a booth where a couple can have their picture taken in the booth while kissing each other.
I, too, have never seen one. I always assumed that they were a thing from The Old Days, well before I was born.
A Wikipedia link directed me to this set of newspaper ads and articles mentioning kissing booths:
At least on the first couple of pages, all the examples are from the 1900’s through the 1950’s. (There’s one from 1963, but it’s a comic strip.)
What about Sadie Hawkins Day? Did you chase Mr Wreck down?
Hadn’t thought of that. Good point.
Here’s a kissing booth story from 1994 - though it is about a hypothetical future event. The quotes do claim that kissing booths were real at some point in the past.
“It could very well be that they get the candy one,” said Lois Moore, junior past president of the post’s auxiliary group and an organizer of the event. “We haven’t finalized it yet.”
The group has had kissing booths in the past, though not for about 10 years. Moore said event organizers might bring back the custom “so we don’t fall in a rut all the time.”
If the auxiliary decides on the real thing, it must round up volunteers of each gender. “We don’t know who the designated (kissing) people are right now,” Moore said.
It’s possible that the whole thing is a legend that always happened “about a decade back” but I suspect there were a few real ones here and there.
Same here. Back when I was of the age to be fascinated by such topics (mid teenage years, in the late '80s and early '90s) I assumed it was the sort of thing that was popular back in the '50s. If they were ever a thing in South Texas, they were no longer a thing by the late '80s.
Here (last page) is a scan of a 1958 local weekly announcing a planned charity “street carnival” with a kissing booth. It seems to have been quite unremarkable back then.
The following isn’t an example of the pay-to-play kissing booth, but…
I remember participating (in the 1970s) in a junior-high-ish 4H Club party with games that included passing a LifeSaver from player to player via toothpicks held in the lips, as well as “no-hands” passing an orange from player to player while holding it wedged between the chin and shoulder, corded-telephone-receiver-style.
Those were planned party games supervised by one of the adult organizers, not clandestine teenage spin-the-bottle shenanigans. I was too naive at the time to realize that the setup was meant to be a bit daring and flirty with the occasional face and lip contact, but it dawned on me afterwards.
Just another example of the way that publicly performed mildly sexualized physical contact between random young people used to be considered normal good fun.
That kind of thing was done on college campuses as part of Freshman icebreaking into the 1980s.
The kissing booths disappeared when AIDS made its appearance.
No, it was Herpes.
I’ve seen one, but it was during an improv show. For like 30 seconds audience members could run up, donate a dollar, and get a peck on the cheek.
My first experience with the French custom of kissing (Saint Martin French side) the woman cracked up laughing because I had actually kissed her cheeks. She explained how to do it and I’ve done it correctly dozens/hundreds of times since.
Is this the booth where you get your face scratched instead of kissed?
Ive never heard of kissing booths in my country