Say Cheese!

What are you supposed to do in a mug shot?


I think smart celebrities need to have a game plan in place as soon as they earn their first mention in a gossip rag. Maybe one day the "Stars: They're Just Like Us" runs a snapshot of you picking your nose while you eat your Pinkberry and then it's a short, slippery slope until you're flashing your new thousand dollar veneers for your mugshot because you either


A) Pull a Winona and shoplift your next designer outfit so you can compete with all the starlets at some launch party for, oh, I don't know . . . a new lip plumper made from sea urchin venom and dragon flies milked by Tibetan sherpas on blue moons in January.


B) Pull a Paris Hilton and get caught with pot two weeks in a row, pot that conveniently belongs to a friend in your entourage each time.


or


C) Pull a Mel Gibson and lose your ever-lovin' mind, causing your mouth to become a combination sewer and vent for noxious, racist brain fumes.


So pick your idiotic infraction. Let's fast forward to you being arrested and then booked and taking the lovely mug shot. It's absolutely going to be broadcast on every available media outlet. "News at 10: President Obama announces free diamonds for everyone in America but first, a minor (talentless) celebrity was busted for a misdemeanor!" Then for the next ten minutes as your crime is discussed, your mugshot will be on the screen. And online everywhere you click. And so on.


It's really hard to pull off a good mugshot.


You get your Gary Busey mugshot:

This earns you the perma-crazy label. As in you will now permanently be considered crazy.


But if you go the other route and attempt to not look like a straight up nutty pants, then you get this:

Apparently, this is considered smirking. (And no, I don't check the TMZ website eight times a day. Ahem.) 


I never even thought of it as smirking until the news told me that's what she was doing. 


That's why I say you have to think this through. If you attempt to have any sort of dignity at all, maybe offering a long-suffering smile, you will be judged as not contrite and if you try to look contrite, you will come off as looking crazy or shifty or something else not good.


You can't win with a mugshot.(That's probably the most obvious sentence ever written since the foundation of time.) And I think Lindsay Lohan is an idiot but she's an idiot who has been totally, utterly, and irrevocably screwed up by her parents so I feel the teeniest bit of sympathy for her. And I think that the girl has enough trouble as she starts her stint in jail that she doesn't need people reading stuff into her mugshot. 


Lame.


Lame, lame.


And now I've got some face pose practicing to do before I'm a big time author and lose my mind and end up doing my best crazy eye after I get busted at the Walmart for braining someone who loiters in the middle of the "Seasonal Items" aisle while I'm trying to get to the swim floaties.


Not that I've ever considered that . . .


*Several eagle-eyed readers pointed out that the first mug shot is Nick Nolte, not Gary Busey. Weirdly enough, I Googled "Gary Busey mugshot" and got what you see. I probably would have figured this out if I hadn't blogged after midnight, but now I'm going to let it stand or people's comments won't make any sense and I love you all so much that I"ll continue to look dumb.


Oh, and the spelling correction in the comments came from my sister. It's pretty much the only time she comments. Sometimes she emails the corrections to me. Mostly she'll just do this.


All I have to say is: It was AFTER MIDNIGHT! And I fixed it now anyway.