It’s October...
It’s Halloween and I’m stuck here...
We were pushing toward the home stretch on a day that I hold very dear to my heart. Unfortunately I was stuck at work, drawing caricatures for the good’ol Alabama Peanut Festival! Don’t get me wrong, I love that carnival, and I mostly enjoy my guests there... Mostly... Alright, that is my last Aliens throwback joke this week. Anyhow, I’m out there working with Flash Cartoon Fan and V-Blog legend Ashley The Man with the master draw Hand Ro**** (name edit for privacy, but this man is an ol G, just don’t ever say the phrase book-on-tape around him) occupying the candyland stand (the kiddy area stand) on the last painfully slow hour of the day.
Look, I have ADD, and I LOVE Halloween. So when things get slow at a time like this, it gets me pacing, it gets me facebooking, and it gets me jabbering about off-the-rail nonsense. I just want to get the heck out of there! But darn it, I’m committed! And I’m suppose to be the manager, so I have to stay, tuck in my shirt, thumbs up, smile, quietly hate myself, and count the minutes of my life ticking away waiting for someone bold enough to bail on Trick-or-treating to ride some sick carnival rides and buy an awesome cartoon face of themself. But sadly, what happens is not really that. The trick-or-treaters are in bed, high on sugar, and dreading the school day waiting for them in the morning. And then the ones who do come out—there is no safe way to say this, so I’ll just go ahead and call them the late-hour-carnival patrons.
So we are hanging out up front. The carnival is dead, at least our end of it is. The midway circle where all the rides are always appears busy, but its wristband holders, it’s teenagers abandoned by their moms, and it’s a bunch of kids with not much else on them then what little can keep them from dying of hunger or dehydration. We are back in the dark, hanging out next to candy castle. I’m staring at it debating going on a diabetic run, but then a Mom approaches with her children. She wants a caricature. She sits them down. I’m a little bit annoyed, a little bit relieved that I got guests to draw. But somehow—call it intuition—I get this feeling that no matter how I draw her kids she is going to hate it. She took two seconds of deciding before she put her kids in my chair. I never saw her so much as glance at our displays, or ask even what the price was before she got the impulse. My strategy in this situation is to succinctly explain our pricing so she can understand that we have to charge per person. And yes that means every face we have to draw. Never quite understood why people think their babies would be cheaper or even free sometimes. They don’t cooperate, (though sometimes they are better than their adults) their heads are about the size of yours, and they are mostly crying... mostly!! Damn it, I did it again. Get out of my head, Newt.
So, my strategy didn’t work. But never fear, they are still going to reject it. So I sit at the board and I start drawing. Ash is watching. I feel the mom’s eyes burning into me, scrutinizing every line. She doesn’t say a thing for a time. She just gets lost in the magic of it. Suddenly, Mom gets flummoxed. She starts scoffing my work. I get flustered. I turned around to try and explain what a caricature is. But before I could Mom gives me a I-got-your-hustle-figured-out side-ways glance. She says to her children, “naw, come on now. He got a trick marker.”
That left me nonplussed, and Ashley laughing his ass off.
I could do nothing but watch, dumbfounded as they scurried off as though I was some sort of scam plague they might catch before they spend all their money trying to win an on the brink of death Carny fish.
That day I knew I should have just went trick-or-treating... or at least just stayed out in the woods to get drunk with some Dead family members by the fire.
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