Loud and unpleasant

Before I even started this class, I knew I was probably going to be challenged.  The girl who made the booking had already proven herself to be aggressive and dictatorial.  I had no personal experience with her, but the person who took the booking - a local agency - told me that her usual terms had simply been ignored.

It's her company policy to ask for a deposit in order to secure a booking, then ask for the payment to be settled in advance.  I have a slightly different policy for my own private bookings, but I completely get the logic for this one.  Well, the girl who booked me simply dictated her own terms and completely refused to compromise on them.

I've encountered people like her before.  She has money, and she feels that this gives her license to behave rudely, to overturn anything that doesn't suit her and to make any demands she feels entitled to.

There were two classes being held on this day, so Alison and I agreed that I'd take the smaller one - with the potentially difficult girls - while Alison would take the larger one and run it with Qba.  I took the basement room and she took the upper room.

The demands started almost immediately and I didn't personally witness all of them.  My class was scheduled to start first, so Alison helped me to prepare and helped welcome the girls, but two of them cornered her and aggressively demanded that she refund them the cost of a drink.  They had wandered up to the other room - the one that Qba was using - had bumped into a screen and had, as a result, spilled said drink.  Alison managed to get the bar staff to agree to provide a replacement, but that was already a sour note.

When the girls arrived into the basement, one of them took one look at the room and immediately voiced her approval and enthusiasm at the same time in that Neddy kind of "look-at-me" way that only  truly obnoxious people can do.  She hit this ear-splitting whoop that genuinely had me wincing with pain - and she sustained that note for at least ten seconds.  It's not even like I was naked at the time, so she wasn't responding to anything like that.  She just wanted to announce her arrival in the room.

Now, normally when the girls first arrive, there's a bit of enthusiasm and they're pretty animated.  That's fairly standard and it's all cool.  They soon settle down.  Not this lot, though.  They talked over each other, shouted at each other, had loud conversations with each other - all the time.  The hubbub that usually settles down fairly quickly, was continuous and sustained.  Repeatedly I found girls looking at me expectantly for direction, but I couldn't talk because someone else was already talking - loudly and animatedly - to someone else.  I'd catch that person's attention and let it be known that I had something to say, but as soon as she'd calm down, someone else would immediately fill the silence up with more pointless jabbering.  I was genuinely starting to get irritated.

They weren't all rude, though.  It's just that the polite ones were also the quiet ones.  One of them looked embarrassed at her friends, caught my eye and shrugged.  She told me I needed to be more aggressive.

So I agreed.  I raised my voice - just louder than the loudest one in the room at that point - and said "Quiet!"  And I drew out the last syllable until I had everybody's attention.  And then, as if I hadn't had to resort to something so dramatic, I calmly introduced and described the "Make A Giant Man" pose.

When it was all done and I got a chance to talk to Alison, I asked how her class went.  She told me that she had a great bunch of girls - quieter, friendly, more polite and really appreciative of what the event.  She said they genuinely seemed to enjoy themselves.  Which was a huge relief, because her class was twice as big as mine, so if they'd all been as loud as my girls, they'd have been intolerable.

I knew my girls were going to be trouble even before I started.  Which is why I chose that group - despite it being the smaller one.  I wanted to be able to handle it personally.

But - with the exception of a couple who seemed to wish they were anywhere else - they were genuinely the rudest, most obnoxious and most difficult crowd I've ever had to handle.

Giant, hairy muppet nipples

This was Kira's second class, and her first one in The Standard.  I left her directions, because she had to meet me there, but she had no trouble finding the place.  My directions are very clear.  It must be one of my few talents.

The place was looking particularly cool, today.  Candles were set out and everything - barring some minor rearranging of tables - was pretty much taken care of for me.  And the two heaters were already turned on, so even if I hadn't figured them out yet, I still had warmth.

I set the laptop up so that it was playing my slideshow video.  And towards the end of the class, it occurred to me that it had a couple of extra uses that I hadn't anticipated.  First of all, I could turn to it and use it to illustrate some of the challenges I had in mind.  While I was describing the "Make A Giant Man" challenge to the girls, I turned to the laptop and waited just a few seconds for one of the relevant pictures to cycle through on the slideshow - and when it did, there was a chorus of "aahs" as they all got it.  A picture is worth a thousand words.

The second unanticipated use was with timing.  I had three versions of the slideshow stored on my drive - all with different soundtracks.  The first one featured a track called East Hastings by a band called Godspeed You Black Emperor.  That was specifically chosen, because the length of the track roughly corresponded to the length of the slideshow, but it was much too sombre for the tone I wanted to set.  The second - with some tweaks to the slideshow running times - featured four tracks.  You're so cool by Hans Zimmer, The Staunton lick by Lemon Jelly, Heroic weather conditions of the Universe by Alexandre Desplat and Jesus walks by Kanye West.  The third was just a lower resolution version of the the second.

The slideshow music was very carefully chosen for different presentations, but during an art class, the video is more of a background option, so the music isn't important at all.  So I cued up all three versions of the slideshow, turned down the volume on them and played my hen night playlist, instead.  That's 15  hours worth of carefully chosen songs, played at random.

So, I strayed from the subject.  The timing of the three slideshows let me know when the class was running down.  The time just flew past with this particular group, so when I glanced at the screen and saw it was blank, I realised that the slideshows had cycled through their routine and at least 45 minutes had passed by since the girls had arrived and I'd been introduced.  A helpful quirk of the running times and a good method of quickly gauging how long a class has left to run. 

 

The girls from today's class were all Welsh - and they were very loud.  A fun group who were definitely ready to have a laugh.  While I was waiting to be introduced, I could hear one of them in particular.  In less then five minutes, she must have said "Oh, my God" about a dozen times.

Later - just for a laugh - I told her I was going to subtract a single point from her score, every time she said it again.  And since she'd just said it a second earlier, I started off by subtracting a point immediately.  She pointed out that she had children and if I did something like that to one of them - punished them for something before they even realised it was a punishable offence - there would have been major tantrums.  It didn't matter.  It was just a random, arbitrary reason to subtract points and I was hoping to see a steady decline in her score from that moment on.  Sadly, she didn't say it at all after that.

It's hard to say what my favourite challenge was, for this class.  I know the first one was a nightmare, because it was one of those where I had to keep my arm in the air for a while.  The second one produced some fun pictures, though.  Particularly one, where I looked like a sort of corpse with a vicious injury in my neck - like someone had smacked me with a cricket bat or something.

After that, though, I posed with the bride - and one of those pictures was really cool, too.  She was wearing horns on her head, and so she was drawn like a sort of happily smiling little devil or demon.  It was a really cool picture and had a lot of personality to it.  It easily won that particular drawing challenge.  

The final drawing challenge was the hardest one to pick a winner for, though.  Two pictures stood out and I struggled to decide which one was my favourite.  I went for the face in the end, but it was a very close thing.

It was the "Make A Giant Man" challenge, so the girls were focusing in on different body parts, and one of them had drawn my nipples.  Apparently she couldn't find any pink chalk, so she used a combination of orange and green, instead.  The result - giant, hairy muppet nipples.  Or something that looked like novelty earmuffs.  Or the creepiest eyes you've ever seen looming out of the darkness.

After that, I passed round the ego-stroking book, handed out some business cards and tidied up.  As Kira and I left, we saw everybody sitting at one of the tables in the main bar, so we walked over to say "goodbye" to them all.  One of the girls spotted my "comedy trousers" on the top of my bag and asked if they could have them for a souvenir, and I was tempted to hand them over - but then, I wouldn't have had them for the start of the next class.  I politely declined.