Invader Tim

Did the whole Red Cross Mardi Gras thing on Friday. Had a pretty good time.
Here’s where the less-good starts: the piece I donated wasn’t in the live auction, it got moved to the silent auction. I don’t know the reason behind this, but that was the way it was. I was fine with it. I didn’t have to do the spot-light thing sober, so that worked out well.
On a sidebar, it’s a good thing registering web domain names is cheap because on the little thing by my piece, it had my name as “Tim Stock” and you know, that’s not my name. It IS cooler. I mean “Tim Stock” is more secret agent or even porn star than “Stotz”—that’s just a sound effect. I’ve heard sneezes that sounded vaguely like someone calling my name. So look soon for timstock.com, my eventual name change, and my driving a pimped out, spy-style car that shoots oil slicks out the back as a design feature, as opposed to the symptoms of squirrels eating away vital components of my engine.
The piece of mine (along with just about everything else in the silent auction) was not bid on well. I felt really failure-riffic for a while. Rationalization of all manner zoomed through my mind—none of it wildly inaccurate, but still it was rationalization. For instance: ‘the crowd is conservative as Newt Gingrich’s skivvies, my picture is not; people will wait toward the end to bid in a Hail Marry style frenzy, and well they have a lot of fingerprints on the picture, that makes it look kind of bad.’
Man, that crowd was conservative! Let’s just say the religious iconography outsold my stuff by gobs. There was this cross picture that was about a table and a half down from mine, and the opening bid on it was literally ten times that of mine. Don’t get me wrong. It was a peach as cross pictures go. There was that longish- vertical line right there, and a shorter horizontal line like so…toward the top, not the bottom.
Good thing I’m not bitter. ‘Cept when I am. Which is now.
No time for that though. I put that depressing crap out of my fool head. There wuz tickets to sell, Skeeter. So I joined Trace, and Miss Rockford and went around selling tickets to raffle off this $3,000 bracelet.
My job: ticket-holder guy. Trace was money-taking gal, and Miss Rockford, or to be more personable—let’s call her “Ashley” since that’s her name, was on hold-bracelet-out-to-show-folks-what-they’re-bidding-on duty. She also was on offer-pen-to-folk-so-they-can-fill-out-their-ticket patrol, but with the title of Miss Rockford comes heavy responsibility—she handled the double-duty with aplomb.
The tickets flowed like wine. We sold an ASS-LOAD.
Then it was break time. The crowd ate, and Trace and I hung back. Pat, one of the people running the shindig, bought me a drink—didn’t hate that. The good folks did offer us some chow, but Trace and I had already ate. Still, real nice of them. Cost the revelers 60 beans a plate.
Then more ticket selling. The levee really broke and we sold tons. Or to continue the theme: ASS-TONS.
Suddenly, we were pulled on the dance floor by one of the Red Cross director-types. For a while, I was the only male, and I must say I danced as well as only a sober white man can. Maybe I should have spared the people the spectacle of me unintentionally doing my Elaine from “Seinfeld,” but I couldn’t help it. The Moonlight Jazz Orchestra will put you in the mood to shake what your Mama gave you. I convulsed; the women-folk danced. It was a whole thing.
Trace was mastering the floor, as is her want—despite the forgetting of the Tango steps. Ashley must have had that tiara nailed to her head for it not to fly off, impaling the passers-by. See. Again with the aplomb.
Local news anchor, Danni Maxwell was cutting a rug pretty well too. That was cool, but a bit surreal. May color how I see her from now on. No matter how much I’ve worked in the land of local television, it still hits me: when you’re used to seeing people exclusively on TV—in very specific roles, no less—it takes a bit of a cognitive leap for you to accept their doing other stuff, like, you know, real people. Now that I have seen her swing dancing, it may be hard to get that image out of my head. ‘In news today, a chemical truck exploded, making Rockford a toxic waste dump of Three-Mile-Island proportions. Now, I’m going to do the Lindy Hop.’
One of the other cool things that came out of the evening was this: Ashley is going to be a 500 foot woman for me when I pick the series back up late spring-ish. She’s cool. I think it will be a blast to work with her. She seemed to like the piece I had there, too. In fact, a lot of the party-goers thought it was cool. Some thought I looked like Kato Kaelin—less cool. But, I think I drummed up business for the art show the following week, and for the series of mine. And there were a few more bids on my piece before the end. A lot less than the eleventy-kajillion dollars (US funds) I had hoped for.
By way of preemptory strike I should point out that I know that it’s a bit hypocritical that my moaning of people not spending scads of filthy lucre on my piece does not contrasts MY not spending any money. But I’m a starving artist, not a cap-ee-tan of industry. And I did donate a piece and volunteered and was a boat load of charming.
Another factoid: this is the second Vaentine’s day thing in a row I spent with Trace…and my hair stylist, Gena. Eerie echoes of last year. It once again was an occasion where we got all decked out in our Sunday-go-to-meetin’ duds.
Last year it was a party Gena threw—a fundraiser, like this party. When I put my suit on, I found a gift certificate I won last year at her party. Shows you how much I wear the suit. I was pleasantly surprised to See Gena there last night. Surprised and intensely aware that in my hectic lifestyle, that I haven’t gotten a hair cut in a real long time. Thus the Kato Kaelin crack.
Oh, I should add this: don’t worry, fellas. Trace and I are just friends. She’s a free agent still.
Anyway, where was I? The band took a break, and we sold more tickets. Then the live auction.
Pat, at the last minute, offered to re-put my piece into the live auction. That was really cool of her, but we decided that I’d keep it where it was. I could claim the taxes that way, and I figured the live auction could be potentially embarrassing. I’m glad I went the less-humiliating way.
The live auction was no more a friend to the art community than the silent auction in most respects. Here’s a litmus paper for the evening: a Tom Heflin painting—the one famous painter from Rockford who’s pretty much a household name, AND he’s also the guy in the Winnie the Pooh stories hanging out with Woozles who scares Tigger—had a painting go for $410. His stuff often goes for in the thousands—nay dozens of thousands. And his sunset looked like every bit as purty of a sunset as I ha’e ever seen.
I felt sorry for the auctioneers. They were exasperated and incredulous and damn near begging. Allow me to make up another quote to demonstrate: ‘Do I hear $425? It’s a Heflin. It has a really nice frame. He’s famous. Come on, you in-bread hill-rod dirt-necks! It’s a fucking Tom mother-fucking Heflin! $425? $410? For the love of all things holy, $410?’ So yeah, it sold for $410, and that was probably only because the bidder thought it was a Thomas KINCAID.
But, the pragmatic of the thing: money is money. It all went to a good cause. And little blows to ego notwithstanding, it looks like a win-win dealio. But you should donate more to the red cross.

Oh yeah. To cap off my evening, my brakes went out. But on the plus side: my emergency brake works fabulously.
See? It’s the space BETWEEN victory and defeat.