The Two Hundred and Seventy Fourth...

Number Two Hundred and Seventy Four:

Athens Tavern, Dinner, Athens Chicken

Great day today. First, Beth Brown comes by my work and delivers two proof copies of our Richmond Macabre book. We high five the awesomeness. Check out the newly vamped website! Then it was a good day on the road, one of my favorites on the Bookmobile.

Well, you could throw the rocks in the glass, sit back and enjoy the bourbon and say that was a good day, but wait there is more! Hope and I then attended this terrific program called Shop Class, a week to week run of artistic endeavor, helping you create, listen and do more than sit around waiting for the next season of WHATEVER to come on the T.V. Ours was with Noah Scalin, natch. One of our pre-assignments was to bring a bag full of stuff that you were either going to recycle, throw out or give to the thrift store. It was really great for Hope to see Noah give his talk about creating something 365 Days, and creativity in general. I saw her head working things out while listening. That's good.

After his brief talk, he told us we had to quickly think of something we wanted to create. Hope chose a snake, I chose a house. Then we had about an hour to create 30 of them with any of the junk on the tables. It was fantastic to see 30 people frantically and creatively make their idea in so many different ways, eventually tearing things apart to create them. After we created each one, we then took a digital picture of it (for an optional Flickr share later), then moved on, letting people either destroy it to make their project or to reuse the materials for something else. Pretty soon people were leaving the work tables and all over the place, using items not from the piles, creative juices flowing, Noah encouraging, various people photographing.

One of Hope's snakes. The chairs! Awesome!

One of my houses. With garage, trophy wife, lawn gnome.

Afterwards, and Hope and I only did 16 each --one person made 52! -- we all talked about the inspirations and how we could use it in our lives. Very awesome energy! Great art series!

Then to top off the evening, we went to Athens. Swell day!