muddling through the art convention

Baked ziti with "beef", tomatoes, and capers; asparagus, fresh rolls & paprika butter, sour cream sugar cookies, water.

I'm at a convention. It's really not an art fair, it really is more of a convention, being held in a very corporate atmosphere, like a big, empty office floor with all of the cubicles removed. There are some booths, but mostly there are cheap convention chairs in groups, seemingly always a speaker, and there is stuff in alcoves along a wall that is like the cabinet wall in the Coke Gallery.

I'm there for two days, the first day I meet a woman running a booth, really just a couple of folding tables, really, with skirting attached around. She has some really interesting prints [which I can't quite remember at the moment], and I consider buying one. Maybe I don't have that kind of money, though.

The next day I'm back, and she has more prints, including some smaller ones that I'm really considering.

I decide to try my hand at making a drawing, myself. I get set up by someone atop a cabinet with some nice tracing vellum and a ruler. I start out with an oversized sheet of lined notebook paper under my vellum and after some consideration use the ruler to trace one of the double verticals along the left side, top tp bottom. Next I will make a boxy shape with a puckered side up in the top right. As I fiddle with how I'll execute this, I notice that my vellum is already covered in marks and lines, all very gesturally sketched, none drawn with a ruler and all accompanied with a large number of alpha-numeric notations. Where did all of this come from? I didn't make these marks. Ahh, I see, I had rotated my paper 90`, but I can turn it back straight and all of that disappears. Done.

I go back to talk to the woman about her prints she's brought today. But I get there and everything is different, she's excited as she tells me that she's quit her job (and I apparently inspired her?). She pulls away her tables and beneath is a big platform, the size of a queen bed. She starts rolling around on it, wants me to have a lay down, too. I really want to just talk about the prints, but that's going nowhere.

Carol Walker is giving a talk, and I go to look at her prints, too, along the cabinet wall. I really like them, but then I realize that they are all done in deep sweet pea pinks and purples and I really can't commit to buying one. Leonora is in the audience and Carol is having a friendly banter with her. Something about a loan that Leonora took out way back in college that she never repaid. Leonora is going cross-stitch and laughs it off.