COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Sunday, June 15, 2008 7:00 pm
If happy people drive you nuts, don’t take a number inside the Department of Motor Vehicles on West O, because Denise King works there behind a counter.
If you need a driver’s license, go someplace else. Because there’s a good chance she’ll be the one to take your paperwork and your picture, up against the sky-blue background, and make you smile despite yourself.
“That’ll be 11 dollars and 25 cents, Curtiss-With-Two-S’s.”
Denise says this loudly to a tough-looking truck driver in a T-shirt. He has a dark beard, no smile.
“Now look at the picture of Winnie-the-Pooh and I’ll take your picture.”
The trucker sees Winnie — a big sticker Denise taped to the camera — and laughs.
Snap.
“Oh! I got you to laughing. So now you’ve got a nice, smiling picture…”
She hands him his old driver’s license and frowns.
“… compared to last time.”
The trucker laughs again.
“I guess it was one of those mornings,” he says about his old photo, then takes a seat.
Sometimes one smile means more than a dozen roses.
Denise has taped Dove chocolate candy wrappers to the camera. Each has a message hidden inside.
Wink at someone driving past today.
Her own Nebraska driver’s license shows a smiling face against the sky-blue background.
DOB: 03-29-1966.
Ht.: 509.
Eyes: Blue.
Hair: Brown.
Weight: We’ll get to that later.
Her face looks younger than 42. Or maybe it’s what 42 is supposed to look like, if you’re happy.
“I see a lot of women my age. But they look 20 years older. I think it’s because they’re not happy. Maybe they’ve had a hard life. Or they don’t care about taking care of themselves for some reason.”
She sees hundreds of licenses each week, takes hundreds of pictures. It makes her think about people.
One great-looking guy seems to lose his license a lot. He has pretty blue eyes and her exact DOB.
“I can’t wait for him to lose his license again.”
Sometimes, when a man getting his picture taken jokes about his bald head, she’ll draw an Afro on a little piece of paper and tape it onto his new photo.
Sometimes, she’ll put little stickers of monkey faces over photos.
Sometimes, she even makes teenagers smile.
“She’s funny,” a blond girl in a red tank and short-shorts says to a friend, who agrees. The blond girl fans herself with white forms as she waits for her license, then returns to looking bored.
Learn something from everyone you meet.
People complain to her about taxes. About paperwork. About why the computers were down the other day. Some “grinches” seem to think it’s her fault. They forget she pays taxes, too.
She snaps her fingers.
Some people, she says, want things done like that.
“Sometimes I get in a rut, where I’m depressed about doing the same thing over and over again, trying to baby people, trying to smooth the water. But then something comes along to perk you up.”
She reminds people she’s a human, too.
Sometimes humor is the best way.
Temptation is fun. … Giving in is even better.
She’s sun-tanned. She just got back from Mexico, where her boyfriend, a Mexican motor carrier inspector, lives. They met in New Orleans a few years ago.
She keeps his smiling picture at work.
“He’s handsome, isn’t he, Mary?” she says to a co-worker.
She lived in New York City until her parents divorced and she moved to Fairbury, her mom’s hometown, when she was 13.
They moved into a shack with no running water. They had an outhouse. She pretended to be sick a lot to avoid school. She made friends eventually with the other unpopular kids.
They told her they loved to come to her house because of the outhouse.
Denise works out most every day at Jazzercise. She used to weigh 245 pounds. She’s lost 70.
“I was a big, solid woman. My boyfriend, I told him that the last time I saw him. I said, ‘I have a secret I have to tell you.’”
She showed him an old photo.
Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.