WHTARQT!* (Vanity, Thy Name Is Virginia)

Photograph by Jessica Gladstone, 2006.

Car-commuters (and I am one) are a curious breed, hovering on one another’s bumpers, desperate to inch forward, determined to avoid, at all costs, the incipient road-rage that is the natural consequence of our daily peregrinations. Behind the wheel at least twice each day, we travel well-worn routes to familiar destinations, negotiating construction sites, detouring the odd accident and — worst of all — avoiding the multitasking driver as she struggles to simultaneously apply mascara, talk on a cellphone and cast sidelong glances at her humming Blackberry while trying to make a left-hand-turn at a four-way intersection.

Chances are, if the multitasking maniac is from Virginia, her biography is stamped in metal on the rear bumper of her car: (WAY LATE , L8 4CT). Windows up and music blaring, the hermetically-sealed orbit of the solo commuter remains well-protected from public view. So how is it that it manages, nevertheless, to communicate — and usually IN ALL CAPS?

Behold, the Virginia Vanity plate: motor-messaging gone wild.

The State of Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles boasts more than 180 customized license plate designs, more than any other state in the nation. What’s more, they make it easy for anyone to design a license plate. If you’ve got an idea for one, you read up on becoming a sponsor, fork over 350 pre-paid specimens (along with their digital files, on the assumption that even more of them will be requested) and you’re done. Virginians appear to favor this practice to a degree bordering on the ridiculous. (Try it yourself here.)

The ubiquity of the vanity plate makes for a discordant kind of poetry: it’s a function of brevity and bad spelling, a terse kind of haiku that’s oddly self-referential. Sometimes, the message being transmitted is merely a reflection of the car itself: “ITS EASY” for a Porsche Boxster or “BIG ENOF” for a Ford Explorer or “DEAD LEG” for a 1973 Wolkswagon minibus. Yet this is just the tip of the vanity-plate phenomenon — a custom that, come to think of it, seems ideally poised for the short attention span of the American public.

You can tell a lot about a car from its license plate. There are, for instance, cars that work (MNY MNGR, ANM8R, PER4MER, C RTUNST) while some just want to flirt (OH HUNNY, 4ASMIL); cars that play (LV2NIT, SQ DNCRS, GLFGAL), while others just want to eat (GUARANA, CHALUPAS). There are sports fans (LUV TWINS); political pundits (HOTAIRE); and hometown hotties (JRSY GL) as well as huge numbers of people who simply want you to know that they’re no longer technological luddites (BLOGGER, RESOURC, BLOWN XP, IHACK4U, UPGRADE, N2 OSX, MAC G33K, MOZILLA.) Finally — and who can blame them? — there are cars that just want to get away from it all (GO2MAUI, LV HWAII, 2KEYWST).

In the end, vanity plates inhabit a peculiar world: cryptic and hokey, they begin to tell a larger story — not so much about the car as about the car’s owner. Not long ago, I was startled when one such owner jumped excitedly out of his Honda Accord, demanding an explanation: why was I taking a picture of his license plate, he wanted to know? I smiled, and gestured to the subject of my gaze: “LRN2JGL?” I replied with as much admiration as I could manage. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

* What a Racket

Jessica Gladstone is a graphic designer based in Northern Virginia. A recent M.G.D. graduate from North Carolina State University, she is an adjunct professor at the Art Institute of Washington.