Springing Forward Out of Chaos

 It was postering week as I went around downtown finding places for our Jell-O Art Show poster, which we produce and distribute ourselves. It's not easy to find places for posters anymore, and I doubt many people spend time reading bulletin boards, with all of our information now found online in more silo-ed locations. But we like art in all forms and we love our posters. The artist, Brian Hahn, has made the last five or so. We didn't do one in 2020, and I remember doing the Jell-O Goes Gold, which was 2018 if I remember right. His are excellent and professional and we love them.

 When the sun is out I like to be outside so yesterday I took things out on the deck and worked on the bigger set pieces that I don't have room for inside. I started that, anyway, but soon sat down and started putting all of my ideas on paper, which turned out to be four pages of notes on all of the projects I'm doing. I do most of the work on the script, sets, props, and of course t-shirts, my costumes, and a piece or two of my own, so I had a lot of details swirling around in my brain and it was really fun for me to see the amount of creativity I am involved in right now. 

In a way it was procrastinating and enjoying the spring day but I feel good about it. I even took photos which look like an extremely manic scattering of what many people would call junk and crap. I'm attempting to not buy anything this year, except I will have to buy t-shirts, but I needs to use up at materials and I probably do have everything I need. Most of it is the ethereal and ephemeral ideas I am generating and collating from the other creative people in our troupe. 

We have so much fun working out our lines, songs and jokes, physical and literary. We know the audience won't get them all. The first rule is to amuse ourselves, and then to share it, but one thing I remembered yesterday is how Art Saves Lives.

There's no getting away from politics right now as our whole world seems to be hijacked by lunatics and psychopaths, with a gazillion good people desperately trying to keep up with it and stop as much as we can. As my defense against the cognitive dissonance I have fully immersed in Jell-O land as I generally do to keep down my anxiety about getting it all done by showtime. We only have two more weeks!!

Fortunately it is all progressing rather well though we realize we are risking offending people with our show this year. I decided to give a little trigger warning in my opening speech, as it will be apparent by our set pieces that we are inviting some super villains. We hope it will be funny and the comic relief we all need, but there is always a chance the timing will be off...some last minute horror could happen that would turn us all to jelly and scare us from making the bold statements we intend to make. I am hoping if that does happen we will pivot and quickly write an epilogue or some way to communicate our real messages to our audience, which is our art and appreciator community here in our region and town. I hope you will come to the show and take the journey with us...we are going to space, if you need a hint. 

For my own piece, as well as the t-shirt design, as I made notes I recognized that I am compelled to channel my radical self. I was transformed at age 19 when I changed schools to American University in Washington DC, where there was a lot more happening than in my freshman year at Purdue. I went to see a film, the 1966 The War Game, about a nuclear holocaust in Britain. It's a fake documentary that cuts. I remember the repeating of "It's perfectly safe" and I dropped in horror into the new reality that governments lie...and I had grown up believing a lot of things that I'd been told. It was 1969, not long after the JFK assassination, and all the others that piled on after, and of course I had crouched under my desk at school many times as a kid. It all added up to me having an instant radicalization, which I never "came back" from.  

I became a hippie, war protestor, and student of politics, and couldn't have been in a better place, or more lucky about who came into my sphere of interest. The next few decades were wild. I moved here to Eugene in 1976 and we had a thriving alternative community so I found a home that worked for me and have been able to just inhabit my revolutionary self. I still practice voluntary simplicity, eat organic, try to be a vegan, and so many things I began at that time. It has been a rich life. 

Which is all to say I have to do something radical with my Jell-O Art. I haven't settled on it yet. I'm hoping as I finish more of the little projects an idea will flash into my visual brain, as I can usually depend on that. It only took about 5 minutes of brainstorming one morning in my journal to come up with a terrific t-shirt idea. You will definitely want one this year, so bring that $10 (maybe I will charge $15, as of course shirt prices are up a bit and I should make a little money I suppose.) I will still have all the old ones for $5, what's left of them.

Checked the weather and it is going to rain Sunday night, so I have to get outside and paint set pieces while I can now. I'll upload yesterday's photos and see if there are any I can post that won't tell all my manic secrets. I know, you all thought I was just a normal, dull old lady, didn't you. Well, some days I am assuredly not.

Can't give away too much about the show...but when you know, you will know.

 

Sliming Along

 It's all Jell-O all the time around here, though I have no idea what I am doing as a piece this year. I made a few flowers and some Slugs-on-Sticks to sell, since people always want to take home something and I am not making many of the fascinators anymore. I have previous years' pieces to bring, which I will, but I still have to make something new. Lots of other things are working around in my brain.

 The script is fun and pretty firmed up, so we have to learn and sing the songs over and over and try to get that done. Not many weeks left until March 22! We spent like an hour just working out how to sing one tiny short song which was a little ambitious for our troupe. We managed. Also, it is a forgiving audience so if we don't sound great, no one complains too loudly. We didn't really manage to channel Taylor Swift that well last year...those stars are popular for a reason, and it's not just the clothes.

Costumes are a very fun part and I have been working on mine, shuffling through my vast quantities of thrifting finds and ridiculous accessories I have held onto for just the one moment when they will be perfect. I don't want to spend any money this year if possible, supporting the boycotting to take down the oligarchy and all, but I might have to get a thing or two. 

Doing everything simultaneously is fun for me, lets my mind roll around being its weirdest with no consequences. By the time the show comes many ideas have been discarded for better ones or simplicity and I can trust that. If I go too far off people start telling me what to do and not do and I like to avoid that so I project their attitudes into my head sometimes to limit myself. One limit is how much I can fit in my car, because I have to get it all there and get it home. A ton of work goes into the three-hour show. 

If you are curious about how to make the flowers, it is a lot like making flowers from paper, folding and curling the gelatin into floral shapes. You have to get the dried gelatin to act like paper, which is tricky. I usually brush water onto the parts I want to bend, both sides, and wait a little for it to soften up so I can shape it without breaking it. Then I put it on a stick, glueing it with the molten gelatin, and glue a leaf on there too. I don't get too figurative with the flowers, just try to please my eye and make something fairly graceful. I layer up a few pieces, maybe a rolled on in the center or a few pieces of something of another color to look like stamens, or just an unusual concoction not necessarily found in nature.

One of the important things to do with Jell-O art is let it do what it wants. It isn't that cooperative about meeting your vision, and the dried stuff distorts itself as it dries, which I just work around. I have made things that looked ugly and I just take them apart and do something else. 

 Most of it does not photograph very well, and I should have waited for better light on these, but I'm trying to be productive today and stop doom scrolling, and there's no sun. Sunlight really does nice things to the flowers, shining through them onto the background and all. I'll look through some old ones and see if I can find better illustrations of how you might want to do it. Or just, like all things Jell-O, roll up your sleeves and get to it.

I noticed that at the Kiva they do have plain gelatin but a one-pound box is $21.00! I have gotten it for about $10 a pound in bulk but everything has gone up, so you might just have to treat it like the fine art material it wants to be. I expect the Jell-O brand is still cheap, and will go on sale for Easter, so if you want to make some Tacky Food, look for that. 

Here's a video of 2023, just to get you in some kind of a mood. YouTube There's No Bizness Like Jell-O Bizness