Okay, I signed up to participate in the arts and craft fair at a local church because a very sweet lady asked me with such earnestness that my heart melted and I agreed. To accentuate the embarrassment of being involved in an Arts & Crafts fair today, I also received word that I was rejected for an artist's residency program that I thought I had a chance at getting. So, karma was really driving the punch home and I tried to take it as a lesson in being humble.
I didn't expect much from the experience, and you never do know who might come your way, and I did have a nice time practicing small talk and meeting locals. I even sold two packs of greeting cards with my work printed on them. Ten percent of the sales is to go to the church to repair their stained glass windows, which are beautiful works of art themselves.
What I didn't like about the night was partially that it was quite slow, not surprising, but mostly because of the woman located at the table behind me.
You know how in stories by Dickens, the characters have physical characteristics that directly connect to their personalities? -this woman was thus. She looked very unhealthy, having black streaks under her eyes as if permanently recovering from a broken nose, missing many teeth, and had the yellow, leathery skin of a misused, smoker's body, black scraggly hair and a raspy, truck-driving woman voice.
I'm sorry to share the details because I feel like there is enough ugliness in the Universe, but hopefully nobody will read my words and this will serve only to release some negativity she exuded into the room and all nearby life-forms including me.
"Do you like my pretty pictures?" She would squawk at people as they approached her table. Of course everyone said yes. Her pictures weren't prints, they were "originals" that she printed out duplicates of and then sometimes glued glitter to. "What program do you use?" I knew right away it had to be Microsoft paint by the square pixels that made up the "drawings". "My cards are better than Hallmark because when people get them they don't just throw them away they'll frame them. They're works of arrrt."
"I wrote that poem." She would gesture to a framed poem about The American Eagle titled something like "Do Not Tempt My Hand". Than she bragged about how 12,000 American troops heard this poem in Israel, she read it in front of 4,000 people in Denver, it was hanging in some military academy in California and it was hanging in the Pentagon. Every time someone walked past her table the numbers of people who heard her poem and other specifics changed as she bragged. Maybe, maybe these things were true, in some way or another, and I wondered if she had fixed the typos before displaying it but didn't summon the gall to ask. I wish I had, but this was at the beginning of the night and I didn't want to sit next to an enemy for 4 hours or longer. When I first read the poem I wanted to ask if she meant the Native Americans' Eagle, because the poem had a line about "You tortured my people" in it; but it was plain this wouldn't have been well received.
Instead I told her it was very powerful.
Her selling technique was plain rudeness; "Do you like my pretty pictures? -then you should buy one!" She would belt out and laugh like this was funny and not making the peaceful perusers uncomfortable. Sad thing is, we made about the same amount of money.
She invited me to join the Longmont Artists Guild, which I had been entertaining the idea of doing, but no way. -not if she's going to be there.
By the end of my patience with the dead evening, she was in full swing, lecturing me and another hapless parent about how are kids will call the cops on us for spanking them and start smoking pot at age 11, just like her son did. "Then they'll sit there and tell you there will be no corporal punishment! -only timeouts! Try putting a 16 year old in time out!"
"Okaayee, Time To Go!" I left so promptly I forgot to give the church the dollar I earned them. Never again! No craft fairs, no way. I just have this one poodle portrait to do and then no more pet portraits either!
