Model Citizen

           

            On the Thursday evening of September 1^st, I worked the first of two Thursdays at Artists 25. Cy Strom, the usual coordinator, wasn’t there that night, but Richard Gilliland, who I think used to run the Friday sessions, toted the bale in Cy’s stead. There were a couple of ladies who’ve been regulars at the studio for many years. When I arrived, there was a young German shepherd prancing nervously around the studio and she growled at me when she saw me. I was assured that she had been doing that initially to everyone and that she was a bad judge of character. I suggested that she might be pretending to be angry. I gave the example of how my cats when they were younger sometimes seemed to pretend to be afraid, and I proposed that it was a type of instinctive play that served as practice for future survival. The dog’s babysitter was the mother of her caregiver. She had been using the studio prior to us arriving and was just packing up. She recognized me as someone she had drawn years ago.

            A young woman arrived to draw a little after start time, and her friend showed up halfway through. Richard offered to charge her half price for half a session, but she insisted on paying the full ten dollars.

            I posed with my motorcycle jacket, even though it was still a little too warm for that kind of garb, but I had modeled in just my usual summer clothes a few months before that and I didn’t want to have them get bored of the same old attire. They seemed to appreciate it.

            I got paid $45.00 cash, and it was the most money I’ve had for groceries in a few weeks.

            As I was leaving, in front of the building was a pedestal monitor. I went over to look and discovered that there was a whole system that had been thrown out, with a sign saying “free”. I assumed that if it was garbage they wouldn’t trouble to say it was free, so figured it must be functional. I took the keyboard and the monitor home, got some two large sized shopping bags and rode back up to get the rest. It was an Acer system with 3 gigs of RAM and a 650 gig hard drive. There were also two small speakers and a Logitech amplifier. I took everything.