Woke up to a messy living room on Saturday with all of the furniture pushed into the middle of the room. Still have lots of trim painting to finish. Ugh.
I'd been living in NYC for fourteen years and I've had nine different apartments; this was the first time I ever decided to paint a single wall! Here we go!
...strip the ink-soaked dress off of Theresa (without messing up the natural ink-splatters on the dress), hang the dress up on the hanger, then carry Theresa backstage. The goal was to do this as quickly as possible minimizing the amount of the time from the lights going out, to them coming back up to reveal only the paint-spattered paper, and hanging dress and an empty chair.
Backstage after the performance had finished! The piece was totally wild. It started with Theresa in a white-dress and lovely make-up. Her hair was pinned-up in an elaborate "beauty pageant-style" hair-do that concealed a bunch of large ink-filled balloons!
Grant and I emerged from backstage, carrying Theresa in a chair and set her down on a large sheet of paper in front of the audience. After we cleared away, a photographer approached Theresa and started taking a series of close-up portraits of her like they doing a fashion-shoot. She made uncomfortable smiles and posed for his camera. A minute or two into the "shoot," she acted like she was playing with her hair, but she was secretly popping the ink-filled balloons! As she popped each balloon, a gush of jet blank ink seemed to appear from nowhere and would stream over her face and onto the white dress.
The performance ended with the the lights suddenly turning off. Now came the part that we'd spent hours rehearsing! Grant and I had to go out in the darkness...
On Monday, we took it easy around the house. Meredith was busy doing some arts and crafts while I did my best to pretend that I didn't have a ring in my pocket and that I wasn't nervous about proposing at a party in front of all of our friends in just a few hours.
Grant arrived and literally couldn't stop laughing. Not only were we hysterically laughing we were also worrying the whole time like "Oh shit, how's he going to react? How are the neighbors going to react? Are they going to be pissed? Could the co-op board kick Fatty out of the building? WHAT HAVE WE DONE???" Hahahah.
Even though the mural wasn't finished yet, it was getting close to 6pm and we decided we'd better clean up for the day, hide all the evidence and clear out before Fatty got home.
Speed was of the essence! Fatty was going to be home from work around 6:30 and we had to have all the supplies cleaned up and the mural hidden away (more on that later) before he came home!
Vin was blazing along! In just three hours time, he'd managed to prime the wall with a few coats, sketch out the mural, and finish the Puerto Rican flag background!
It was crazy to watch him work! Totally shocking to see how nicely it was shaping up when this was pretty much his first time working with spray paint!
After the flag background had dried (which in the 95+ degree heat didn't take too long) Vin used tape to mask out the flesh tones and started on the next layer of the mural.
And before I had a chance to change my mind, Vin busted out his roller and started priming his canvas. DOH! I was literally FREAKING OUT at this point like "Holy shit, holy shit. We're actually doing this! I hope he doesn't flip his shit!" Hahahah. A few minutes later, I got a call from my soon-to-be roommate Niki! We'd gotten the apartment we wanted and she needed to meet up with me so that we could finalize some paper work and submit it. I was only too happy to have an excuse to leave the scene of the crime.
So on Tuesday night Grant gave me his set of keys to Fatty's apartment (Fatty works a day job and gave Grant his keys so that Grant could use his apartment as a "writing studio" during the day) and bright and early on Wednesday morning, I met up with Vin near Union Square to go "art supply" shopping.
The airline also lost Philip's giant "Fucked Company" banner. (He started a site called FuckedCompany.com and people always want to meet him. So we planned on enticing people over with the FC banner and then talking to them about AdBrite). So we decided to also make a banner that said "Fucked Company" and explained that the airline lost our signs.
One of us had a tiff of the logo on our laptop so we got it blown up super big and printed out on a giant paper banner. We then hand-painted it. The entire time we laughed about how ghetto it is to show up at an advertising themed conference (you know, where people are supposed to be experts on how to advertise) with a fucking paper, hand-painted banner.
So before we left for the conference, we had a huge AdBrite banner made up for our booth, but the airline lost it. We went to Kinko's in Vegas to order a new one, but they told us that it would take at least 24 hours. So we decided to take matters into our own hands and make our own giant banner. (Yep, that's right - with Crayola paint).
