something i thought i'd never do

LIZ SAYS: Today, I did something I thought I'd never do, voluntarily at least. I was fingerprinted.
The woman who with her surgically gloved hand tells you to "try not to help me", attempts to control a hand that you try to make limp. All the time, the image for a thousand movies, a million TV shows, goes through your head. Next comes the mug shot, front then side, but wait, there is no proceeding crime scene. This is going to the FBI to prove I'm no threat, that I've never done this before. A good conduct record = the absence of a record which you prove by giving your fingerprints to the FBI, to find or not. Bizarre. Having to prove that I haven't done anything by doing something associated with doing something.
The French have made me do a thing I would never have imagined doing voluntarily.
It's sort of like going to the doctor and having him/her say 'relax'. You immediately cinch up, you try to make your hand go limp but then there are all those images, "Top of the world, Ma!" (maniacal laughter).
The police department is moving or being refurbished in Madison and the temporary, I assume, headquarters for the fingerprinting was through the basement which smelled strongly of canned vegetable soup. You found the window through which you pay and then crossed over to the next window to the fingerprinter. Both windows in the same room but neither person seemed to communicate with the other and that soupy smell.
Then you go through the forever beige door to the fingerprinting room. Dick had been fingerprinted before. As a child, he had toured the FBI, who evidently give the kids a thrill by fingerprinting them and letting them listen to the ear splitting chop of a tommy gun. I, on the other hand was lost in my Hitchcockian fear of authority, hoping my hands had never been anywhere that could cause me to be accused. "...but I didn't ... your honor", walking down a long hall with the jail door striped shadows cast on the wall.
But, then she showed me the industrial sized plastic tub of "washwipe" or whatever it was called, the ink melted off my hands, I put the cards in the envelope, with the $18 money orders and sent them to the FBI. Up to four weeks from now, I'll have my fingerprints back on a card stamped 'no record', approved as a good citizen of my home country, possibly acceptable to you, Monsieur? C'est bon?