monday afternoon

We dropped by Elizabeth's sister's house last night after dinner for a few minutes. Her sister has two lovely German shephards and two even lovelier daughters. Unfortunately Georg and I were both a bit tired from the weekend and the drive in to Baton Rouge, so we didn't contribute much to the conversation.

Elizabeth must have talked to her sister because when she came back from her errands, she mentioned that the youngest daughter, Caroline, is wild to see my car. Caroline never said a word or betrayed any curiosity while we were there, but apparently she made her mother look up my web site as soon as we left last night. I'm always happy to oblige someone who's interested in my car, so in a little while Georg and I will clean out the back seat so we can all go back over there in Undersea Mah Jongg.

In the meantime, back to the Main Street Drag, this past Friday morning. When we left off, I believe we had just started to roll, and Georg had narrowly escaped being left behind by jumping into the car as I passed by.

Well, we drove around town, with a police escort of 3 officers on motorcycles, sirens blaring, to get us through the stoplights. It was incredible! I had no idea where we were going -- I just followed the group around town. We drove around through some pretty deserted areas. Occasionally people would wave at us from bus stops or workers would run out of buildings to wave. But mostly people seemed to be annoyed at having to wait at stoplights for us to pass. We imagined the commuters muttering to themselves about "those damned art cars holding up traffic!" Eventually we pulled up at our first stop, which was a group of elementary school kids.

I started out at the end of the line, as I mentioned, but when we parked at the first stop, a traffic circle, I somehow ended up in the middle and stayed there for the rest of the morning. So that's the order I'll describe the cars.

We were in a group of 8: first our leader, a small car covered with a mosaic made of shards of CDs. She had used many many copies of the same CD (looked like those free AOL CDs mainly) to make stripes of the same color. This CD car was different from others I've seen because the CDs weren't completely embedded in glue. In fact the edges stuck out all over the place and there was a warning on the side of the car not to cut yourself on the sharp edges. I wondered about the prudence of taking a car like this around to schools, but there doesn't seem to have been any harm done.

Next was the zebra car. This was a Jeep completely painted in a zebra pattern, full of zebra pillows and bean bag chairs. They had a large zebra and dressmakers dummies covered in zebra fabric on the roof. And all the people from the car wore zebra clothes. In other words, they had the zebra thing going on!

After the zebra car was the laundry car. I can't remember if I've talked about that one already. It was covered with plastic laundry detergent bottles, and had irons on the hood, laundry baskets filled with old clothes hanging from the sides, a washer and dryer on top, and a big T clothes-line stretched over the top. There were bras and underwear hanging in the windows and poetry about laundry written in the spaces around the detergent bottles. It was amazing.

I should mention that Georg and I were talking in the car this morning, and he pointed out that my 2 categories of art car are actually 3: between the daily drivers and the sculptures are the, I guess you could call them parade floats. Cars that are still recognizably cars, but you couldn't actually drive them on a regular basis. The laundry car was definitely one of these, as was the "Car Wash" (more on that one when I get to the parade).

After the laundry car came Chaigirl. I'm pretty sure I described her car before. She had brought her baby Toby, and a friend who I think said she was from Boston. Chaigirl's friend was also an art car driver but she hadn't brought hers this year. At each stop Chaigirl would detach the baby art car from her hood and let Toby play with it. He could walk if he leaned on it, so he had a great time waddling around pushing his own art car. I was a little concerned about a baby being around all that noise and excitement, but he seemed to thrive on it. The kids loved him; one kid asked Chaigirl if he had made the baby art car himself!

We were next after Chaigirl, and then after us came another water-themed car. Theirs was all sandy like a beach, with waves on the sides made of soft insulation foam and a giant sandcastle on top. The sandcastle was mounted on plywood and strapped to the top of the car for events only. They told me that the car was too old for regular driving anymore, so they used it for events only nowadays.

After the sandcastle car was a car that had been stripped of all its paint & left with this lovely brushed steel look. The driver said that the texture had just happened when he took off the paint, but I have to admit it looked too nice to have been accidental. I think he must have brushed or buffed the metal to get that pretty texture. He had also chopped off the roof (it looked like it had been some kid of jeep or hatchback) so now it's a convertible that, um, doesn't convert.

Next was the rat car. It didn't have the total coverage of a lot of the cars, which was good because I was starting to feel like my car was totally lame compared to all those amazing cars. So it was nice to see another car that looked a bit subdued, like mine! The rat car was painted and had plastic rats and slugs on it. The license plate said "EAT RAT". She told us that she only did rats because when she decided to do her car, she had gone to the toy store and rats were on sale that day. But now, people think she's really into rats and they give her rat things not just for her car.

That used to happen to me all the time when I had Little Pig Boy. I can't even remember why I did a pig theme on that car, but I do remember that people used to give me pig statuettes, pig hand-towels and oven mitts, pig shirts, all kinds of things. I would use them on the car if I could (for instance I put the pig oven mitt over the hand brake), but sometimes they were too nice to glue onto the car. And I never had the heart to tell people that I wasn't into pigs in my life, just on my car. So I ended up with a lot of pig stuff.

Luckily that hasn't happened so far with Undersea Mah Jongg. And even if it did, it would be OK because I really do play mah jongg and fishie things are easier to incorporate into one's home than piggie things. Georg has given me a few toys that, while they would look really good on the car, are too nice to risk losing. Like he gave me a Professor Frink figurine that I would have loved to put on the surfboard. But I'd hate to lose him, so I have him on my desk back home instead.

Anyway. After the rat car was the final car. It wasn't really an art car, actually it was an electric car with the Orange Show logo on it. It looked like an expensive sports car. I don't think I even met the guy who drove it, nor did I meet the zebra people. The zebra people were much more interactive with the crowd than some of us. They let the kids get inside their cars and they played really loud music. In fact they played that Lion King song -- Akunna Mattatta? -- over and over during one stop at a younger school. I thought I'd kill myself if I ever heard that song again! Georg and I mostly hung out with the guys from the sandcastle car, Chaigirl, and the guy and girl from the laundry car during our stops. We all sort of hung back together and watched the kids looking at our cars.

And I see that I have described 9 cars. So we must have had 9 in our group. I don't know why I thought it was 8.

OK, so the first school. I have to admit this first stop was not a great experience for me. They were elementary school kids and I was really unprepared for their destructiveness. I'm used to kids poking and touching my car, but I'm not used to them grabbing with both hands and yanking as hard as they can. It wouldn't have been so bad except that the teachers did almost nothing to control them. The teachers stood there watching groups of kids rip things off my car, either saying nothing or occasionally venturing a "Touch with one finger," which the kids completely ignored. And I couldn't do much to control them either because I was on the phone, arguing with Verizon tech support about the stupid web cams that were as usual not working.

The one that really yanked my chain was seeing a kid pull something off my car, and the teacher take it from the child, glance surreptitiously at me, and then toss it into the open window of my car! The teacher! I would have expected the teacher to have enough class to apologize to me, or better yet make the kid apologize. Instead that teacher showed her students that it's OK to damage other people's property as long as no one notices.

Most of the cars in our group were not at risk of this kind of vandalism, just because of the nature of their decorations. I think my car, covered with toys, must have presented an irresistable temptation. My glue is strong enough to withstand hours on the freeway at 75 mph, but no matter how strong the glue, it can't hold up to a person grabbing on and tearing things away.

I don't know about the laundry car, but I did see that the sandcastle car lost some chunks out of their waves. The waves were made of soft foam and those kids just started tearing at it. They told me later that one kid took a bite out of a wave! He must have thought it looked like cotton candy. That insulation foam is incredibly toxic but for gosh sakes, who would have expected a child to bite the side of a car?

Anyway, enough griping. At least it was only one school that was so grabby. I got almost everything back from the little monsters, & the few things I didn't recover I had replacements for. So I guess it's no harm done in the long run.

The next school was such a change for the better, it almost made up for the little vandals at the first school. The kids were really well behaved, no one tried to damage anything, and the teachers kept a close eye on them. Instead of being allowed to descend on our cars in packs, the kids walked past each car single file. The youngest kids had to hold each other's hands while they walked, so no one had a free hand to grab. Chaigirl told me that last year they did that at all the schools she went to, so damage to the cars wasn't an issue at all.

Georg and I thought it was a Catholic school because the kids were so polite -- addressing me as "Miss," asking if they could touch the car -- and because they wore uniforms. But we didn't see any crosses on the building and the name didn't sound like a Catholic school name. Later we found out it was an "at risk" school, which I guess means disadvantaged kids? Kind of interesting that those were the best behaved of all the children.

I did have an interesting exchange with one little boy. He asked me if it had something, a word I didn't catch. I asked him what he'd said and he repeated himself. I still didn't understand, so I said "I don't know what you mean." He held out his hands and said "Hydraulic! Does it have hydraulic!" I guess he'd seen low riders before. Alas, I had to disappoint him! I'd love to have hydraulic lifts in my car, they are really impressive, but as yet it's just a plain old art car.

I also heard that as the younger kids were walking past the laundry car, they were pointing to the windows and yelling "Ew! Underwear!"

OK, this is getting kind of long. So I'll finish up the Main Street Drag in another entry.