SST: 12 Cans

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

I spent much of the last two weeks working alongside my roommate Seth at the Ann Arbor Art Center. Seth works as the do-everything/fix-everything guy there and since they had an unusually large number of big projects to tackle, Seth hired me on as an helpmate. I spent the whole week lifting really heavy stuff, painting new shelves, knocking out walls, and getting generally filthy.

However, it seemed like we spent most of our time undoing and then redoing the work we had done previously. For instance, last Monday we rented a U-Haul truck, went to a really grody warehouse, loaded up a lot of really grody (and heavy) junk, and then stashed it away in a spare room at the Art Center. On Thursday, however, we found out that there supposed was to be a drawing class complete with a nude model in that same room where we had worked so hard to stash all that junk, so we had to move it all out into an adjacent room. As we were restacking everything in the new room, I thought about this modern-day Sisyphus from Sesame Street:



A few hours after we finished relocating everything, Seth and I were working on rearranging the cubicles in a downstairs office. A man stuck his head in and said that the model for the drawing class didn't show up and couldn't be contacted. He asked if either of us would care to model for the class, either with or without clothes. Since we were working on a project where I was basically stepping on Seth's toes, I volunteered to model.

When I went up to the class the teacher asked if I felt comfortable getting naked and I told her I would be just fine with clothes on. Did I want to just take my shirt off, since it was warm in the room? No, really, just fine with the shirt on.

This was my second experience as a model (well, technically my third). My first experience was very different - I posed for an oil portrait and the artist wanted to chat with me during the whole 2-hour sitting. He didn't mind if I moved around, and he even said that a small amount of movement from me helped him inject some life into the portrait. However, for this drawing class I had to keep perfectly still for thirty minutes at a time, which is not an easy thing to do for a hyperactive person like me.

But I got the hang of it and the last two 30-minute poses seemed to go by a lot faster. It's nice to know that if all else fails I have my modeling career to fall back on. It even pays slightly better than moving heavy things back and forth.