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.
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