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

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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.

#49 "Hare of the Dog" January 5, 2012 In Color!

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Obviously, Easter is not about hares, rabbits, or bunnies. However, the Easter Bunny is not an American invention conjured up by some Ad Man down on Madison Avenue to move vast quantities of chocolate and cheap wicker baskets. I wholeheartedly thought it was until I read the Easter Bunny Wikipedia article, which I strongly suggest reading. It's fascinating. If you don't want to read it, here's a quick overview: Originating among German Lutherans, the Easter Hare originally played the role of a judge, evaluating whether children were good or disobedient in behavior at the start of the season of Eastertide. Yes, Eastertide is a real thing, as is Christmastide, but I will not be going into these things here today. The German Lutherans brought this tradition to the Dutch region of Pennsylvania when they moved to America in the early 18th century. The hare would lay eggs, colored in various colors, mostly red (to symbolize the blood of Christ ) and green (to symbolize the new growth of the spring). So this tradition of a rabbit that lays eggs goes back as far, if not further back than Santa Claus. I am happy to tell you all that this is incredible news to me, as I totally thought the Easter Bunny was older than me by a decade or two. I always think that the commodification of holidays is a strictly American phenomenon, but it has been going on for centuries! Granted, when the early German Lutherans were coming up with this folklore, they weren't selling anything, but were merely coming up with interesting stories to tell their children and trick them into being good, so that they would eat the leftover eggs that were forbidden during Lent. Tricky adults. I am always interested in finding out how traditions like this are started and I am usually more excited when they were not concocted in a boardroom by a bunch of stuffed shirts. Think about it. Modern versions of this kind of storytelling and tradition never catch on; take for an example, the holiday known as "Festivus." This is a holiday that was created by the family of one of the writers on Seinfeld, and then turned into a full episode in which Jerry and his friends decide to make a holiday that went against the extreme consumerism of the Christmas season. Yes, people in certain circles celebrate this holiday, and during the holiday season at the bar, you can always hear a couple of smart-alecs saying "Happy Festivus!" after also saying "HappychannukahMerryChristmasandHappyKwanza." But my point is, is there's no Festivus Clown that shimmies through the radiator to deliver fresh foie gras to good boys and girls. And, although Festivus does in fact, have a couple of "traditions," it is an extremely niche holiday celebrated by a couple of fanatics of the show, Seinfeld. I can't even think of a modern equivalent of the Easter Bunny. It is a rare thing to even have a new holiday. Much less a new holiday mascot. Most new holidays are in memorandum, and it would be insane to have a mascot for these holidays. And there are plenty of holidays with no mascot, or one that isn't particularly memorable or commoditized. I am thinking of one of my favorite holidays, New Years Eve and New Years Day. The mascot of this is Old Man Time, and the New Years Baby who wears the sash displaying the new year on it. But that tradition is being lost, at least in this country, by all these dropping balls. I think that is because that particular holiday is mostly for adults and they don't intrinsically care for mascots in their holidays. They no longer believe in the children-oriented mascots because they themselves have become these mascots, and act as Santa and the Easter Bunny, staying up after the kids have gone to bed putting out all the gifts and such. The sense of magic that these mascots create for children is lost at a certain age. I think future generations should make mascots for all of the holidays. I think Chris Columbus should sail across the sky in a magical Nina-Pinta-Santa Maria Super ship dropping blankets, medical supplies and booze to unsuspecting adults while they sleep on Columbus Day Eve. I want the New Years Bum to cure all of the hangovers with giant pancakes and Bloody Marys. I want a giant winged Uncle Sam to give out fireworks on the third of July in preparation for the Fourth. And so on and so on until the adults are as excited about the holidays as the kids are. Because after all, why should youth be wasted on the young?