Uncorked

Reader I'm just getting back so I don't want to hear any flak from you.

I just spent the weekend in Charleston, West Virginia (kill me) seeing a friend for her fortieth birthday. Everything went fine except this one little incident and I really can't wrap my arms around why it's bothering me so much.

This one thing in a whole line of strange, weird weekend antics, which even includes a trench-coated fringer with feathers sticking out of his hat (?) and a Mickey Mouse & Gang mural at a bar.

So the friend is celebrating her birthday at this business called Uncork & Create, where people sign up to bring some wine and foody stuff to this pretty spacious gallery (?) and be instructed on a theme.

Ours was acrylic on canvas and the subject was supposed to be a cherry blossom. Which, on the face of it, I'm not seeing how this is going to be a lucrative business in and of itself, but it's actually packed.

Packed with what? A shit ton of white people and they're all chewing gum (shiver) and I mean every last one of them. What in the ever-loving hell have I signed up for? I still have ghost echos of the sounds that were emanating from their pieholes.

But then I get into what turns out to be a bang'n sangria and I start having conversations I won't remember the next day. People seem to know my name and all night I'll hang on the precipice of saying "Why do you know my name?" but it's ok because the sangria? Bang'n.

Blank canvas. There's a little plate full of the paints we'll be using, three different size brushes, and a blank canvas right in front of me.

The teacher gets up front and shows us an "after" image, the thing that we're supposed to be producing here in the time we have. It's great, I love it, it's a branch and a cherry blossom and I'm stoked this lady is going to show me exactly how to reproduce that image with the tools I have in front of me. Let's go, baby.

You want the white mixed up with the blue and then slathered on 3/4 of the canvas? Oh hell yeah, I got you, Boo. Then this yellow? Flip it over and do the bottom (now the top) with pink? I got this. I got this.

I was having a good time. Switch to the medium brush for the branch. I'm on my way.

The canvas is no longer blank and I'm not seeing it yet, but I'm confident that what I'm doing will lead to the finished product the teacher has set up near the front.

Things started to diverge shortly thereafter, as to what I was doing on my canvas and what the finished product looked like. I was becoming a little concerned that I would not be able to pull my efforts back into line with what her efforts were easily yielding to her trained hand. But I wasn't going to stop, I had faith in my artistic ability and in the teacher.

Together we were going to make a cherry blossom that would make the art community weep. People would be wearing their scarves and black-rimmed glasses and rending their clothes, kneeling before the image that I was in the midst of producing. The art world was about to be turned on its head and I was just the Atlas to do it.

It may have been the sangria, or the slow acceptance that my abilities with the brush are a little more limited than I was prepared to admit, but the diverging realities of my canvas and hers were coming into sharper and sharper contrast. But I was still happy with my efforts. It's what happened next that made me want to force choke a stranger.

So, everyone is finishing up their respective projects and milling about checking eachother's work out with their Oh That's So Good's and Look At That's when there seems to be this buzz around the back of the room.

I'm sitting in the front row so I can open a artistic channel between me and the teacher but apparently this painter in the back must have turned out to be Rembrandt coming in and sitting for a surprise reveal. He would stand up and say, "Hello, yes, I'm really a fantastic dead artist and thought I would join you for a session just to show off how artsy fartsy I am, thank you, thank you." Well, that's how people were acting, anyways.

I don't want to sound like I'm unhappy with my finished product but I am a little disappointed people weren't standing around me watching me add the last flourishes. What in the hell was that guy in the back doing? I had given him a pass earlier because he's literally the only other person there not chewing gum, but now he was irritating me. It seemed his cherry blossom would be the one the set the art community ablaze.

I thought I would get up and see what the big deal was, why this asshole (ok, he wasn't an asshole just yet, but he will be soon and for the sake of space I'll just go ahead and start referring to him as asshole) was up to.

So, what had asshole done to win over the hearts and minds of the art class? Why, he had painted a skull onto his canvas to accompany the cherry blossom. A skull with multi-colored eyes and really nothing else special about it. As for the cherry blossom itself? Complete shit. Seriously. Could no one see that he had obviously given up on the assignment and devoted the rest of his time to painting a skull at the bottom? And this is what everyone was clamoring on about?

Give me a break. What an asshole. It was a juvenile move and he knew it. Borne of some misplaced need for attention and playing to the crowd.

This lady had spent the last uh...(sangria) trying to teach us how to paint an image she was obviously very skilled at and deserved our full attention and this guy was back there painting a skull like he was in goddam detention.

Ok, it wasn't such a big deal and the rest of the night was great.

But, Reader, I think you can see how that would've been irritating, and that's why asshole will never ever be able to paint again.

Somebody had better come fawn over my artistic work and they better do it soon.

I call mine Sans Skull.