Story time

Two posts in one day. I must be avoiding something. More often than not, the thing that is so great about painting is the stuff that happens around the painting; something cool in nature, like the time I came face to face with a herd of friendly elk, or the great people I have come to know, or just being outside and really getting to see and feel nature. But once in a while something happens that is just damn funny. I had just wrapped up my third day of workshop teaching in Maryland and after a lovely dinner with some of my class, I dropped by the local watering hole to have a nightcap. There I ran in to two artists, one I knew and one I didn't. Just a couple of guys painting and pallin' around. Really funny guys too. The two Steves. So we line up at the bar and have a beverage or two and talk about..... wait for it.... art! Yes, that's pretty much all we ever talk about, well, that and good stories. One of the Steves was dressed with a topcoat and a big scarf wrapped fashionable like around his neck, a beret and a stylin mustache that managed to get most of the beer before he got a chance to swallow it. Also at the bar were a couple of ladies celebrating something and one of them comes up to us and says, maybe because of the dapperness of Steve 2, "what do you guys do?". Now normally, I'm only too happy to admit that I'm an artist but for some reason I decided to lie. She just had a certain drunk gullability to her that I couldn't resist. I looked at her straight in the face and told her that we were part of a collective brain trust with several very successful inventions under our belt and that having made our millions we were now practicing a form of full contact ice fishing in the Himalayas and were vying for spots on the Winter Olympic team. A mountain range, by the way, that came to mind because as far as I know they don't have a lot of lakes there. Much to my surprise, she bought it. And the two Steve's started adding on more and more ridiculous details about our chalets and our decked out Sikorsky helicopters, which is how we get to the lakes in the Himalayas. One of the Steve's was also the proud owner of a tall ship in Scotland. Ahhhh it's good to be rich.

After a while I had to take my leave and felt bad about the lying and fessed up, she was a school teacher and it just didn't seem right. I had heard the next day that her friends abandoned her and the dapper Steve 2 got to drive a very inebriated lady home to her husband. I think he just sorta dropped her off and squealed outta there. I sort of wished I hadn't fessed up though, it was a good story.