Tim and Jeremy are both waiters at a restaurant in downtown New York City. During slow times at work, to stave off boredom when it is slow, the two young men draw pictures. These pictures are made using ink and what is called the "Triple Dupe Pad," a book of paper used to place orders in the kitchen. The drawings usually take about a week to make, all the while also being used by fellow employees to take orders; this sometimes leads to other collaborators or in a couple cases, to the loss of the work. The drawings are then scanned and colored in Photoshop where they come to life in stunning technicolor! The subject matter varies from piece to piece, as they are made over a long course of time and under various moods and states of mind. They all retain a playfulness that serves as a coping mechanism after spending a night catering to the endless needs of hungry patrons.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

#67 "Otto's Summer Vacation" In Color! August 6, 2013

(Click on the Picture to Make it BIGGER!)

For one reason or another, I remember starting this one (or at least adding the strange baldish woman[?] in pink) on Mother's Day 2011. How can I even remember that, you ask? Well, the answer to your question is that I have no idea how I can remember drawing a specific drawing on a specific date nearly four years ago. My memory is not that great, to tell you the truth. I blame it on years of hard living, and the fact that so much happens to a person living in New York City that it gets harder and harder to remember things. As one living in NYC, you are constantly being bombarded with sensory experiences. Just getting to work, you are surrounded by people, noise, movement, showtime, traffic, and of course, more movement. Add in a fair amount of partying, and you can easily forget what you just did two nights ago. Of course, you can go back and really concentrate on what you've been doing with yourself for the past week, but to go back and remember what you did on a random Tuesday last month, or Mother's Day in 2011? That seems difficult.
However, I know that I started drawing that woman[?] on that day. Here's the story.
Let's back up to when I first started working at the Loup 13 years ago. I had to work Sunday brunch for the first 5 years I worked there, as far as I can remember. It was a brutal shift. I was in my 20's and I was going out all the time. Having to be at work and functional on a Sunday morning was the last thing I wanted to be doing, but I had to pay my dues. We were never really that busy during brunch, so it would have been fine, but for some of my co-workers who certainly did not like me when I first started. They would make my already dreary mornings a living hell. And so we worked together for 5 years, eventually becoming "friends" in the process; actually a couple people who could tolerate each others company while working together. So, it was right around this time that Lloyd decided brunch needed a face lift and added jazz to the mix. So now, even to this day, the Loup has Sunday jazz brunch. At that time, we also dabbled in the idea of having jazz three nights a week  with The Junior Mance Trio. Junior didn't really like that gig, and so now we have the Trio every Sunday evening. That is worth coming in for. As I have probably mentioned before, Junior is a legend, and to see him at such an intimate venue is a treat that you can't get anymore virtually anywhere else in the world. Jazz brunch, on the other had, is like punishment. Thankfully for me, I only overlapped with the jazz brunch for a very short amount of time, and so I got to have the experience, and then be happy in the knowledge that I didn't have to work it anymore. However, sometimes people are out of town and need to have their shifts covered. I will happily cover shifts for my co-workers; even Sunday brunch, albeit grudgingly.
So, that's what happened on Mother's Day 2011. Tomoyo must have been in Japan or something and I picked up her Mother's Day brunch shift along with my Sunday night bar shift, making for a Mother's Day that we ended up calling "Your Mother's Day." ("no, your mother's day!") I like to party and I like the ponies, and The Kentucky Derby happened to fall on the day before Mother's Day that year. So the day before, I was down in West Chester, Pennsylvania watching the Derby with some friends of mine. A couple of us knew that we had to come back to the city first thing on Sunday, so we didn't party that hard. Just kidding. We woke up on Mother's Day and three of us slogged into my boy Cramer's Mini Cooper. I was in the best shape, so I drove. Cramer promptly curled up in the back seat and passed out, while Gabrus and I laughed our way to New York.
Once I got to work and had my coffee, the Mother's Day crowd started filing in. We weren't particularly busy, and so I started drawing this picture. The band was playing and my drawing was the closest thing I could do to tune them out. But, right around the time I was finishing up the woman[?] that's when the torture started. The band leader's wife got up and started singing. She does this sometimes, and it is pure insanity. Her song choice is nuts, her tone is deaf, and it creates a sound not unlike fingernails on a chalkboard. Of course, this is just my opinion and who am I to judge? So, I start tensing up and then it all goes to hell once she goes into her second number. I can't tell what the melody is until she launches into the first verse. "Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry..." Yes, she was singing "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" from Oklahoma. But in the jazzy mood.
I couldn't handle it. The song broke something in my brain. I dropped my pen and went out from behind the bar and out of the restaurant, letting the waiters know that it was a self-serve bar for at least the time it took for this song to be over.
So, did we get to the bottom of this? I think we did. I think I remember that I started this drawing on Mother's Day 2011 because I went through a traumatic experience that day, and because of that, I remember the exact origin of this slightly unnerving drawing. The brain can work in mysterious ways. In fact, even though we know that we have a brain and it controls everything we do as humans, we have very limited knowledge about how it actually works. So chalk this one up as another unexplained little nugget of mystery. It's funny too, because the more I stare into the black eyes of that woman[?], the more it reminds of those dark days of working brunch, where the coffee is never full enough, the eggs are never fluffy enough, and the Bloody Mary's never have enough booze.

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