Latest in the ongoing, scintillating Accidental Series.
This image is entitled "Cops Coming: Corporate Challenge's Beginning, Blurred from the hip."
After a day of gigging, and showing the Middling City sites to Chicago cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm (including those cataracts near the casinos), made images of Corporate Challenge. As is tradition.
The stretching, the hydrating, the puzzling pre-race beer sippers, the pinnings of paper numbers, the hoopla of the half-day tent complex of an array of company barbecues. Some orgs/companies (such as the BigU) go all out with tent, buffet, goodie bags, whereas other companies have little more than a 10x10 tent with a party sub sliced up on a card table and a cooler full of bevvies.
Fred wanted wings and, of course, Yours Truly took him for take-out at Gabriel's.
He wavered at his choice but ordered bbq wings.
We took them back to Kennedy's and we three ate pre-gig wings (Fred played last night at Hallwalls); YT ate four wings, as many as YT has eaten in the last six years.
After hosing off the bbq slop, Fred dropped me off at an edge of the race boundary and YT trotted madly to the U.B. tent on the other, far side of the meadow.
At the cataracts Fred revealed himself to be quite the Nikolai Tesla scholar.
A lifelong scholar of all things DC.
I announced that a bonus to our Niagara Falls day trip would be that Fred could not only see the Tesla bronze near the edge on Goat Island, but that he could crawl up onto Tesla's lap.
He was skeptical, even after we'd parked in the nearby lot, walked to the sculpture, and YT pointed to the very burnished spots on Tesla's hands and lapbones.
See, YT, said, so many people clamber onto him that he's shining.
After some more additional, gentle prodding, Fred took the plunge, and climbed atop the opened lap of Tesla.


His gig last night, replete with Canadianathusiasm to the max, with Steve and Ravi was super as the outside skies first lightened with increasing intensity and then a thunderstorm assailed the MC – the first of an audacious series by Nature.

Rain rain Love.

Well add that all to the section of the bio to do with Artists & Models involvement. As I looked over the images made by YT that evening (those kept and not sold for cash money to bennie Hallwalls), I pondered the event's 21 incarnations - different venues, changing cast of characters, sense of cohesion, dancefloors, and other stand-out mems.

One that popped into foremind was the third A&M, at Great Arrow Building on Great Arrow and Elmwood, how there was a corridor lined with living Rodin sculptures, buff men up on pedestals, their bodies painted what else ... buh-ronze.
Or the one on Main Street when Pahts and I were a living Calvin Klein ad and YT had the buzziest and shortest 'do ever for the occasion.

Onwards to now. Or then, the near then, of Saturday evening.
This inception of YT's interactive Polaroid booth was prop-happy, and props were shopped for for weeks. Office art, just the right sort of name badges were critical for the nursing staff, bathrobes, and the usual signage and Polaroid-related goods.

Gave the nursing staff their tequila-related names: Nurse Mezcal (SherryB), Nurse Sauza (Jana), Nurse Cuervo (Annie), Nurse Lime (Mish), Nurse Proof (JenM), and Nurse Worm (YT). We were a bitchin', saucy, nurturing staff prone to feeling scalps as we consulted our phrenology charts, shouts of RELAX, and our Nurse Sauza capping off most nursely statements with a shriek of Stat. YT had one straightjacketed patient spit out his gum into a gloved hand. Give me that gum, YT ordered. Are you joking, the strapped-down man asked. You cannot go into SURGERY with gum, yelled Nurse Cuervo, and out the gum came.

The Ward was busy all the livelong night, solidly from half an hour after start time until 1 a.m. - when it was time to call it a wrap and get most of the props and items hoisted onto my gurney and rolled out to the nearby vehicle.

Had a break only when ValT insisted that YT see her installation across the way, a couple of rooms that focused on mania, and depression. The next day, as YT cleaned up the remaining residue (the soothing framed office art and a few other items), observed that Nurse Sauza's shoes that were left behind were completely missing, and what else remained was a tiny plastic shot glass, a Little Mermaid crayon (from my Ward's artist and crafts table where patients were led and robed so that they could make happy pictures on their Polaroid folders), and the two small pots of faux fleurs.

What the above images are, top to bottom:
1. Nurse Sauza doing intake.
2. One of the Ward's phrenology charts. Know phrenology. Love phrenology.
3. The staff - (l. to r.) Nurse Proof, Nurse Lime, Nurse Worm, Nurse Cuervo, and Nurse Sauza. Nurse Mezcal was out triaging.
4. Nurse Mezcal, with patient Scott V. NB: Mezcal's neat sutures.
5. Staffers working on Steve Kurtz, media artiste Paul Vanouse assisting, between Sauza and Mezcal.

Recall: Kurtz's exhibition SEIZED opens at Oilwells this Saturday, 8-11.
YT will be there, with cam and a few bells on.

Wards teeming with safe, happy Love.