36 Dirty Wooden Doors and a 300 Pound Piece of Petrified Wood

NOVEMBER 12 2006

The freelance visual Gods are smiling down on me. I've been booked all week including this weekend and going right through to Friday of this coming up week. I've been working at the showrooms for Elie Tahari and John Varvatos this past week installing their Transition/Prefall 07 showrooms and prepping for Holiday window installations at both companies. One of the highlights/lowlights include attempting to hang 36 nasty, dirty old wooden doors from the crumbling ceiling of the 100+ year old showrooms for John Varvatos. As I was in the back finishing up the cleaning of the doors job, I heard the first large crash as one of the doors released itself from ceiling. It was decided at that point that the rest of the doors should be lowered so that the weight of the actual door rests on the floor. Funny thing was, at the beginning of this installation I had expressed my concern over the nature of the ceiling and and that fact that there was no way that they were going to be able to hang 150+ pounds of anything from the ceiling. I've been working in that showroom for 3 years and every year, a new Visual Director wants to hang something from the ceiling that wasn't meant to be hanging. And every year, a good amount of time is wasted on the process. At least I get to work with a few of my Visual friends who I haven't seen in a while. I can't devulge any info regarding the Tahari job as I signed a confidentiality agreement with them when I started almost a year ago. Besides, I like working with them and don't want to lose my freelance position there. During all of these double-shift booking days I have somehow managed to work on a few of my "Faces" for the "Face" project. I've been drawing 1 face each day as promised, but the printing process is way behind. The last image printed is from October 7th, and today is November 12, you do the math. I have a large stack of drawn out and partially drawn out "Faces" just waiting to be worked on. On that note, it's time to get back to the print I'm working on, and go fold my laundry and get ready for the late-night window instal at Tahari in Soho. Breath, Breath, Breath.