Since I had to work early on Monday morning I rushed
through my songs. I managed to eat some peanuts and drink a glass of milk but
the coffee I made got sipped once before I had to leave. It was surprisingly chilly outside
and though I was wearing my fall gloves I would have been more comfortable with
my winter ones and even a scarf. My fingers were almost numb once I’d gotten to
OCADU.
I was
scheduled to work for Greg Damery and thought that I would be continuing a nude
portrait that I’d started on the Monday before Thanksgiving. When he arrived
though he told me that he hadn’t even known that I’d been booked for two weeks
in a row. The class wasn’t prepared to continue with the same pose, so after
three ten-minute poses and a twenty he had me start a different long pose,
which I did for the rest of the day.
He
asked if I wanted to have the same arrangement as the time before whereby we
didn’t take a midway coffee break so we could have a 40-minute lunch break and
also leave twenty minutes early at the end of the day. I said that would be
fine but asked him to let me know when it was time to leave because the last
time I actually continued working and only ended up leaving five minutes early.
He felt bad about that and explained that he never wears a watch and really
hadn’t known. I felt bad for making him feel bad and told him that I hadn’t
thought that he’d deliberately ripped me off.
The room was quite cold and so he got me an extra
heater. I was feeling kind of dozy though and I was embarrassed that on two
occasions that morning he felt that he had to call, “Wake up!” He bought me a
coffee at lunchtime and I laid down on the stage for a while. I didn’t sleep
but the rest seemed to help because I was wide-awake in the afternoon.
Greg told the story of something horrible that
happened to a former OCA instructor named Tom LaPierre. I had worked quite a
bit back in the 80s at the college for both him and his wife, Pat Clems. Greg
said that a few years ago Tom and Pat were walking downtown on a windy night
when a sign broke off and slammed him in the head, causing immediate brain
damage and then death a year or so later. I had never heard about that.
Greg, who has a strong understanding of anatomy, while
helping a student draw my left ankle, noticed there was something odd about it
and asked if I’d ever broken it. I told him that I’d sprained it several times
over the years and then finally fractured it.
Greg said his father had gotten shot through the leg
during the war in an attack that killed his entire tank crew. The only reason
he hadn’t been killed as well was because he just happened to be standing up in
the tank at the time. Supposedly his dad was behind enemy lines for three days
and killed 15 Germans.
I stopped at Freshco on the way home where I bought
some ground beef and a few other items. After lunch and a siesta I spent the
rest of the day working on my philosophy essay, which was due the next day.
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