Jell-O Research

Jell-O has a long and rich history, and is well over 100 years old, in the form of  a convenience food you can buy with instructions. As it is a byproduct of rendering animals, it was used for probably centuries as a luxury product or maybe even a regular item in any home that kept and used animals for food. Things like consomme, molded savory or sweet dishes, and many common foods used gelatin for its interesting properties and mostly neutral taste. Someone finally packaged it up for people who did not want to take the trouble of raising meat animals and parting them out to make other useful things and substances.

Get this book if you can find it, Jell-O: A Biography by Carolyn Wyman. It was published in 2001 and she did contact some of us to include us in her book, which is super fun and put us on the map internationally. If you are on Instagram, just look around for jellies and Jell-O and you will find tons of working artists and lots of leads to find out more. I have a few posts down in the archives about some of it, with links to the people I discovered awhile back when I had the notion to be a world-famous Jell-O Artist. If I have time later I will try to add a few to this post. You may still be able to find The Jell-O Knight on FB, or David Gibbs who is one of our most prolific and dedicated local artists. He can lead you to many others.

Due to my discomfort with social media I have lost touch for the most part with all of that, just staying in my own little realm using enough energy to get each year's show to happen and to keep my hand in, but some years I have low energy for it and this year is one. Not sure why, probably the world situation which is about as easy to navigate as a cream cheese and celery lime Jell-O salad in the middle of your plate. You know you CAN eat it, you just don't really want to.

But I copied out a few things from the book the other day. There's a lot more! 

 Things people say about Jell-O as something impossible: 

Like nailing Jell-O to the wall 

Like trying to find bones in Jell-O 

Like eating Jell-O with chopsticks 

Like lassoing Jell-O 

Nothing’s set in Jell-O 

That sounds like legal Jell-O 

Jell-O for brains 

Slogans: 

There’s always room for Jell-O (1964) 

Jell-O again (1946) 

The best of everything (1967) 

How sweet it isn’t (1968) 

Just for the fun of it...Jell-O tonight (1956) 

If it was there you’d eat it (1970) 

Somehow it’s always right (1971) 

Make someone happy. Make someone Jell-O (1972) 

Don’t say no, say Jell-O (1975) 

Jell-O is thrilling but not filling (1978) 

Make some fun (1979) 

What being a kid is all about (1987) 

You can’t be a kid without it (1988) 

Jell-O gelatin’s place is a kid’s face (1990) 

Still the coolest (1995) 

It’s alive (1995) 

Smile more (1998) 

Make some magic (2001)

In the Kitchen Today

 I know I need to write more...but it's not that easy thinking of new things to say, so I just repeat myself which isn't that fun either. But today, along with making some adjustments to what is now an actual script for the performance, and practicing some songs, I am planning to make Jell-O again! 

I had a little thing that restricted my ability to lift, but I'm figuring I can lift a half-full quart jar now, and the actual Jell-O I make is light and doesn't require a lot of hand and arm strength to manage. Also I have worked out some ways to do what I'm not quite recovered enough to do.

I'll just tell you that I'm going to work on what will be a campfire...with flames made of big pieces of Jell-O shaped like flames, that may or may not move around a bit or be illuminated from below to look like they're moving. I made a small fire in this piece a few years ago, so the plan is just make it bigger, but also transparent since it will be on the stage and can't block visibility. It is going to use up some gelatin.

I'll use my regular formula, 6 ounces of gelatin in  two cups of cold water in a quart mason jar. I mix it up thoroughly, and with cold water you don't get the lumps you would if you used hot water. It only took me about fifteen years to learn that bit, rediscovered from old Jell-O salad recipes. The gelatin has to "bloom," or absorb water, for about ten minutes and it gets solid though grainy. I melt it in the microwave for two minutes and then another minute or two, until it is liquid and clear, though it will be hot! Don't keep it in there if it starts to boil or rise up and threaten to spill out of the jar. Cleaning up molten gelatin is pretty tough. If you do spill it, let it harden a bit until you can peel it up cleanly so you don't have to scrape and throw it away. If there's a little dirt or crumbs in it, you may be able to peel that off, or just let it settle to the bottom of the jar when you remelt it.

I rarely have to throw the used stuff away...I remelt it, sometimes with a little water, sometimes just as is. If it gets moldy, you can possibly remove the mold, but generally I do throw that on the compost pile for the squirrels. It takes s few days or a week to get moldy, but rotting gelatin has a smell you don't want to become familiar with. So if you plan to keep some around a long-ish time and it isn't fully dried, keep it in the fridge and pay attention to it. When it starts to rot it gets liquid at the bottom. Fair warning.

Whatever you use to color it, put it in the molten gelatin. I usually divide the big jar into smaller pint jars, with one half-pint with a wide mouth kept partially full to use as glue, either spooned out with little spoons or poured out. I generally don't color that but if you use a lot of glue for your piece, you may want to color it to avoid it looking like glue.

So I pour my gelatin into pyrex dishes usually, for the glossy surface of glass, but for these bigger pieces I use lids of big plastic tubs, which will make it look dull on one side, but you could maybe use an old piece of window glass if you have one, or something you have around. Be careful. I have a whole set of pyrex I use only for Jell-O Art because it can dry so strong that it pulls chunks and shards right out of the pyrex, ruining it for food use and also getting a little bit dangerous for you, if you aren't careful. 

A few hours or a day after pouring these big, thin sheets, I peel them up, maybe tearing or cutting them, or twisting and shaping them according to my vision. I flip them over so they can dry on both sides, and I'll do that several times over a day or several, until they are throughly dry so I can keep making pieces until I have what I need. 

Then I will find a way to glue them together to shape my piece. Sometimes I need some kind of support for it, to drape it over a bowl turned upside down, or prop it somehow so it will dry the way I want it to. If it doesn't, I can brush it with a little water, soften it up a bit, and try to re-shape it. The "glue" can be removed or left there, melted again with hot gelatin, whatever works.

When glueing, you either have to hold the pieces together for a minimum of 90 seconds, of have them sitting in a way that will allow the glue to stay in place. You can get it kind of cool so it doesn't run all over the place, but you have a short window of time when it is the right consistency to work. If you wait too long, or move the pieces before they're stuck together, you get this chunky break-up of the gelatin which is useless for your purposes and you have to scrape that off before you try to re-glue, or you just get too much gelatin piled up and it won't dry properly.  Ideally you want everything to dry within a couple of days to avoid that mold. 

I put everything on top of furniture or on a clothes rack in my living room, which has electric heat, or if it is nice outside I sometimes put it in the sun, though you risk dust getting stuck to it, or squirrels getting interested. 

You can use a lot of different things for color. I use powdered dye, since I have a lot here that I use in my other crafts. I've used different kinds of paint, powdered metallics, and youcan sue food coloring or other things like milk, candy coloring, or whatever you have. If it's liquid, be careful not to dilute your gelatin too much with it.

It really is rather easy to do this type of gelatin, and you want some challenges to work on, so go ahead and be ambitious. I tried many things over the years with varied amounts of success, but all that is part of the fun. The best part of the dried gelatin is you can start now. No need to wait for spring break or get anxious about the deadline of the March 28th show, when you might want to go to No Kings and your Jell-O has to be finished first. Again, if you anticipate missing the drop-off time, let me know and I may be able to help. 

And feel free to make edible Jell-O if your family will eat it or you want to make Tacky Food for the Buffet.  That you will have to do carefully, in a very clean kitchen and not in advance, so no one gets sick. It doesn't really spoil unless you have some dairy product in it or something like that, but do everything you would do for a potluck with your inlaws. If you treasure your inlaws that is. 

And for those of you who celebrate tomorrow, I made this with beets, and it was delicious. Nobody would eat it though, and not because it was too pretty.

 

 

Post-Show Review I Never Got Around To in 2025

 I see that I only wrote about the sets and props and then never got around to much of anything about what happened in the gallery, or even on stage. Briefly, I played a buffoon, and my two compatriots were other iconic fools, and we got yeeted into space by the populace of the world. We tried to grift the Space Buccaneers, who had left for space years before and survived by selling Jell-O to other space dwellers.

 We villains forgot to bring any food, just brought our crypto, and as it was worthless, the buccaneers didn't accept it, but took it anyway, giving some Jell-O which got turned into magic Jell-O by a couple of sprites. In a surprise to everyone, we villains were transformed into the Golden Girls and everyone loved each other in the end. As I did say in another post, no one got their just deserts, which I found usefully punny. 

 I told the audience to let loose on the villains as it was a melodrama, but our audience is too nice, though someone did abscond with my "No Kings" crown. They booed a little. It went by fast with lots of fun and ridiculousness. We had two videos, both embarrassing as they captured our missed lines, bobbled cues, and need for more practice. Sorry we couldn't just post them. I presume the Community TV one did air. I felt somewhat responsible for not staging things better; for unknown reasons I like to place myself at the corner of the stage as if I planned to cut and run when it got too bad. It wasn't that bad.

 

 The Jell-O Art itself was not that ridiculous. there was the one attention-grabbing torso, by Dan Armstrong, who returned to Jell-O Art after several decades with this huge amount of perfectly jiggly flesh, er, gelatin. It was delightful or disgusting, depending on how tall you were perhaps. We get a lot of kids at the show who are about pedestal-height, so they sometimes miss the full effect. Edit: I know it is art, but I took out the photo of the nude torso. It's just not a good time for me, for one, to look at it. Sorry if that offends.

 

I like to take photos of the artists with their pieces as soon as they get them set up, though some people kind of sneak theirs in. I caught an Old Slug Queen coming back for a second try, this time with an elegant wall hanging. 

The Raining Slug Queen had to attend to give her Benediction, but she has come a few times, once as a substitute and now for her big moment. She has brought Jell-O Art quite a few times and hers was springy. I gave her a Jell-O Slug-on-a-Stick, which she stuck in her piece. 

 

And that is it for useable photos from last year. My own piece never got put together properly as I became enamored of a set of springform pans I got in a free pile and didn't really make the Jell-O Art that would have explained itself. I tried for a young, mature, old kind of progression but it's lost to history. My real piece that I worked on a lot was the wig, which sadly didn't fit quite as well as I planned. Gelatin tends to shrink and it did fit a one point. So it sat on my head but since my whole costume was over the top that didn't really detract.

You all have my apologies but due to a personal situation I won't be able to type for a few days or longer, so I am going to just publish this as better than nothing. I hope to do better this year. 

The show is the Jell-O Art Show, not the Radar Angel Revue or something, and though I love the performance and do my best to make it entertaining, and it did give a lot of joy, the show should be about the art and the artists who make it. I hang out all day to take photos of people as they proudly display their pieces and call themselves Real Artists, and that is what I think should get top billing. So I will work harder this year to make that happen, post-show as quickly as I can. 

Intention matters. Hope to see you there, March 28! Come between No Kings and dinner maybe. We'll have Tacky Food! (No guarantees there will be anything to actually eat, but there's usually something.)

Politics in Person

 

Ack. I just realized that we are scheduled to have the Jell-O Art Show the same day as No Kings III, which is likely to be a huge demonstration and may impact people's ability and interest in making silly art or coming to see it.

Most of our troupe are political, even radical perhaps, some of us forged in the Vietnam War protest era. Last year if you were there you saw us get pretty jiggly with it. 

We tried to keep it silly despite our passion and many of our rehearsals had interludes where we caught each other up on the latest outrages and tried to address things obliquely but honestly. 

If you read my posts you might remember one late at night where I addressed some of my despair, and it was a hard year last year. But this year, we have no idea what to do about our emotional landscape. We're immersing in singing and writing clever lines and hoping we can at least deliver some moments of laughter and joy by creating the sacred space of art.

We plan right now to keep it light and happy as a respite for people, but obviously our crowds will be smaller than usual and anyone trying to make and deliver their Jell-O will have a harder time doing so. Do let me know if I can take your piece to the gallery and I will do my best to do that. 

No Kings Jell-O Art will be appropriate and it will also be fully acceptable to distance yourself from reality for a few hours and let things go, for the collective health of our community. You can't really fight all the time. You have to have some joy in the mundane and we've done this Jell-O thing for almost 40 years. So, no, we can't cancel. We even made a zoom video in 2020 when we had to stop mid-March and drop our nearly completed rehearsals. The film we made in 2021 was at least a way to gather without getting too close to each other, and we had a kind of bubble to protect ourselves while we put it together. We thought maybe things were "back to normal" after last year. Alas, there is no normal.

I still have the gold Jell-O wig and orange tie. I took it to Market a couple of times but without the costume and context it is just uncomfortable to wear and easy to break. I will probably bring it as part of my art submissions, as I generally bring several of the old pieces to show people what can be done with the dried stuff. I hope to have the ability and time to make a piece that can easily be as inflammatory as I want it to be. 

One year I used a real AR-15 to make a mold to make a Jell-O version of it, some magazines and bullets, and I posed it in a casket being swallowed by dirt and flowers. It sat on a pedestal of legs dressed in camo and I think I had some poetry or something. Since feminism is political, nearly all of my pieces have been that on some level. I never used a Barbie without irony. 

Last year I used the t-shirt design as a platform and I will bring bandanas with that same Banksy-inspired image but without the lettering. I put it into my regular inventory of what I can protest bandanas which were nearly all images from shirts I made in the Bush era, twenty-five years ago. Remember that election when Roger Stone funded that fake protest in FL about stopping that steal, which resulted in the Supreme Court anointing Dubya instead of Gore? Fuckers. That was the summer I made this one: 

 Sometimes we concern ourselves with trying not to offend our public appreciators who do come to our shows, and we try to make things family-friendly and also respectful of our hosts at the gallery who may not share our politics. We try...but then we always have something in there that offends someone. I mean, I'm offended by jokes about body functions and not everything we say is fully informed to avoid racist, sexist or plain ignorant views. We are predominately white people in the US. Woke, but imperfect and subject to mistakes.

Like scheduling a show on a day when we all should be in the streets. Darn. It wasn't our fault. We'll see what we can do to ameliorate the harm. 

Ohhh...I just got an idea for a shirt design. We'll see. 

Trying to Be Serious About Jell-O

I finally did go through with making some Jell-O but not what I had thought I would do. I have to create some space which involves a couple of projects and maybe getting rid of some things, which I do not enjoy. I'll get there.

I did make these boingies which are fun to play with, though I don't have an immediate plan for them. I just thought if I started with something fun, it would get me going. It's like the trick of leaving some part of your work undone at the end of a session so you have a quicker start the next time. 

To make these, I use the strong gelatin recipe (3 oz per cup of water) and spread it about 1/4 inch or so thick in pyrex pie plates (after adding dye.) Then I let it sit about 6 to 12 hours, (less time is better) and use a sharp exacto knife to cut through it in a circular, spiral pattern to make a long, continuous narrow strip. I gently take it out of the pan and put it on another, or a plate, or any surface really, and twist it and turn it to have some interesting bends and shapes. Not that it will follow your directions, but you get more chances to shape it. You'll want to turn it over as it dries, or maybe drape it over something, when it gets firm enough to not break itself. 

Later, you can get a section wet if you want to bend it differently or make it do something even weirder than it chose to do on its own. You can always get this dried gelatin wet or damp and it gets flexible, so you get lots of chances to shape it the way you see it. I like to glue the end of these into a flower or in another place on a hat, and when you move, it moves, though it can be hazardous for anyone you want to hug or converse with. But it's something to try. It can be very rigid so you could make some kind of support for something, but it is hard to dry things that are thick so that can be limited. There's a lot to learn about physics, strength and gravity when you try to build things out of Jell-O. 

I remember this one piece that was a breakfast, with a suspended syrup bottle and a straw filled with "syrup" and I think you could do it without the straw, perhaps. Not to support the bottle though. I don't quite remember how they did everything in that piece. I'll go through the archives and see if I have a good photo. Food is always a good subject to render in Jell-O, particularly if you want to make some type of political statement about food. I like to use candy molds to make little shapes, which can be gummy-like or just hard and inedible, depending on your purposes. I think gummies do use gelatin, though I haven't researched that. 

 Here's the photo from 2012. It looks like the plastic straw supported the syrup bottle, emptied enough to weigh the right amount I think. Great use of props! Can't read the artist's name, and don't know if this one from 2013 is related. 

I suppose technically you could make breakfast foods that are garnished with or made from Jell-O, if you are weary of actual breakfast foods. 

And don't stop at breakfast if that is where you want to work. I made some sushi with Jell-O strips inside instead of cucumber, etc., which was actually tasty. Taste is not lacking with Jell-O, as you can make anything taste great with the right chemicals and expensive food scientists and factories. It has a great texture as well, and the brilliant transparency is a most seductive quality. That's some of the joy of Jell-O and why people keep coming back I guess.

I have a book called Jell-O a Biography by Carolyn Wyman which lists the many slogans used over the years, which are sometimes hilarious and endlessly useful when writing about and creating Jell-O. There are of course lots of old memes like the stapler from The Office and "nailing Jell-O to the wall" from corporate parlance. We need some new memes I think. The phoniness and lack of food value in Jell-O is fair game, as is the fact that it is made from hides and hooves of slaughtered cattle. One reason it is such an old food is that people liked to use everything from their livestock and it was probably easy to accidentally discover the gelatin from cooking up the waste parts. Also why it was mainly a savory food for a long time. You don't normally make desserts from animal products. But wait...dairy is an animal product. So much for that theory.

 I think I'll read back and see what still needs to be said about last year's show, since it is way too cold to go outside today. I will have to bundle up and go to practice in a couple of hours. I suppose we are lucky to not have snow. But snow and Jell-O! Wouldn't that be fun.  

Jell-O Jamboree

 

Yes, indeed, it is Jell-O Art season again, and I am as usual a little bit late to the party. After the Xmas retail season I need a vacation so it takes about this amount of time to get the decorations put away and get to thinking about the show, my art, and my goals for this Jell-O year. It makes the timeframe really short! The Show will be March 28th. 

Our show has landed at the beginning of spring break for the last couple of years (this year it is at the end of spring break), so that the gallery where we have it can hang and take down their other, month-long art shows that are their real business. We get to suspend all that art world business to be completely irreverent and bring out silliness into their space, for one Saturday evening that somehow takes months to prepare for. The gallery is at Maude Kerns Art Center, at 15th and Villard in Eugene. (You can go tho their website for lots of photos of past shows.)

Art on glass by David Gibbs

We decided on Jell-O Jamboree for this year, feeling like everyone in our sphere needs some simple, childlike fun, and we as a troupe need to regroup with less of a narrative and more of a variety show. The Jamboree evokes celebration for its own sake, with a touch of nostalgia. It's likely that many people immediately think of Boy Scouts, and that's okay, because we do plan to bring together all of the many troops of artists and appreciators who are linked through Jell-O.

However you want to use it, Jell-O remains a silly, gorgeous, uncooperative art media that can be taken in any direction. We're an art movement that defies structure. First time, 37th time, all are welcome. Whatever you want to make, how ever you want to do it, theme or not, pretty or not, we want you to have fun with something irreverent, impervious to judgement, outside of the critical structure of the money-art world, and just pleasing to the eye and spirit. I know some people still eat Jell-O...I generally do not, but again, make your own rules. If you want to make something edible, be safe in your preparation, but you can choose to put it on a pedestal or carve it up for the Tacky Food Buffet.

This was Tacky Food, and delicious

 

We try to pick a theme with a lot of latitude and interpretations,  so you can comment on art, politics, our local scene, or anything you want. Focus on the Jam part if you want---Jell-O Jam. Turn Boree into Boreal and make a tree. Gather up your own scout troop and make some together. 

Nothing is banned or inappropriate, although we do ask that no one make a big mess if possible. Throwing Jell-O can only be done if you clean it all up and the white walls don't have to be repainted. People have done that...we either had a kiddie pool with wrestling in it or it was someone's idea that never got to the final stages (Jell-O is cold, by the way, making wrestling in it not as fun as you might think, as my next-door neighbors found out one summer. Also it takes a giant amount to make something thicker than water, and the price has gone up no doubt.)

I just checked bulk foods.com where I have bought my 25 pound lots in the past, and it still hovers around $10 a pound in big quantities, more in smaller ones. Agar-agar is more  but it says you need less, 1/3 to 1/2 the amount of gelatin. If you are just starting out you can play with Jell-O itself, but the name brand stuff, although cheap and usually on sale, has a lot more in it than gelatin, so you still need a lot. If you want to make jiggly Jell-O, you can certainly start with the brand-name boxes (and there are some off-brands too, if you like to support smaller producers) using less water for a firmer texture that may not need refrigeration. The bigger boxes of Knox clear gelatin have gotten very high-priced, and I think there is only 1/4 ounce in each of those envelopes, but it's somewhere to start. 

I use just plain gelatin powder, which I color with dyes that I have around from my other art forms. I generally work in dried gelatin, and my mix is 3 ounces of gelatin to one cup of water. It's pretty arbitrary, but I try to stick to it so I know what to expect. I put the gelatin in a quart canning jar filled to half, (that's 2 cups of water) and put in 6 ounces of gelatin, stirring well. I use cold water! It's a lot easier. Then after it "blooms" for about ten minutes (absorbs water) I put the jar in the microwave for about 2 minutes and melt it. 

Be careful as hot Jell-O is sticky and will hurt you. Then I put in the dye, pour it in thin layers in pyrex dishes, or molds, or whatever I am doing according to my plan or the lack of one.

Then I put it in a hot dry place like on top of the piano and tend it for a couple of days until it is dry like paper. I'll go through the process in a later post but I want you all to know how simple the process really is for the kind of art I have been making lately.

With the dried stuff, there is no jiggle, which is one of the best parts of Jell-O art, so you may want to reduce the recipe to use less gelatin and get that firm but jiggly texture that holds its shape and is workable by carving, molds, or stacking pieces together. Melted gelatin makes  excellent glue but you have to have a little patience as it takes a minute or so to go from warm liquid to cool adhesive. And of course if something doesn't work out, you can remelt it and start over. 

That's the basic recipe, gelatin and water, and you can use a lot of different things for color, including those neon food coloring kits and things like milk, candy coloring, metal powders and whatever you have around. Ink, paint, natural materials like flowers, you try it.

If the theme doesn't give you a workable prompt, play for a while and let your brain come up with something you want to do. I usually have some technique or end result I want to find out about. I've tried the gelatinas, which you make with syringes and other tools, and it is hard, but very fascinating to see and even eat. I'm made all kinds of molds with wax, plastic, toys and found objects. I sometimes like to go to a thrift store and see if there is anything fun I want to center around. Once I used a copper-faced pink breadbox to represent a house for Fishhead Barbie. Barbie has made lots of appearances with the rest of her family, including GI Joe. Props are just fine and many of us use them. 

Personally I like to make political statements and there will be those. It's a little tricky to know what will be funny or urgent in late-March, but you can make a good guess or just project. It doesn't matter. Your community of Jell-O Artists will like anything you make. Or they won't, but you won't know about that, because we have no winners, no Best of Show, no evaluation of success or quality. There is no bad Jell-O Art. It's just about having fun, and if it isn't fun, maybe you should make yourself do it anyway until you learn how to find the fun in there. That can be an artistic journey all in itself. 

The Radar Angels, the group of artists and creators who started this in 1988, wanted to stimulate the inner artist in everyone and give people access to participating in a gallery show. When you put your creation on a pedestal in a gallery, art shifts for you. It's not supposed to intimidate, but free us from the usual criticism we do to hold ourselves from really enjoying our creative lives without limits.

Jell-O will limit you, as it can be super uncooperative if you try to force it to do what it can't or isn't in the mood to do. I like that challenge, and although I don't know if I will find a new technique this year, I do plan to start today with some part of a project. I like to do props for the stage and I know of one that needs to be made. I'll be making some large sheets on the lids for big tubs. They are plastic so it won't be shiny like it is when I use pyrex, but the lids are flexible so it is easy to get the gelatin to release...sometimes it sticks to the pyrex and you have to know some techniques to free it. Read back to some earlier posts for tips or let me know what you want to learn and I'll try to write about it.

So get going! It's a perfect day for Jell-O. Internet research is also great fun...there are quite a few Instagram artists who make delightful gelatin (called Jellies in other countries) and there are even a few shows here and there, usually focused on edible sculptures, but look them up. You can try posting things on my Facebook page, Gelatinaceae, where I will try to keep up despite hating all things FB. Follow some inspiration on Instagram, which has more videos. I promise to share more. Maybe I'll even get around to my review of the art from last year, which I never did complete. 

Jamboree! Sounds fun. 

 

Set and Props

Before I do a show review with all the Jell-O Art, I want to honor all the work I did on the set, props and conveying the narrative through visual cues, to extend all that fun for the future. 

Maybe it looks better with the actors in front of it, and it isn't placed as I had envisioned it, but there are a couple of parts I really liked. We wanted to be in space, in two very different parts of it, with styles to coordinate with who we were. On one side we had what we called the Golds, whose ship was made of cardboard and had gold and logos all over it, plus a little graffiti. Their background, which was supposed to be right behind them, was covered with gold embellishment like the Oval Office now is. I really liked their ship. I wrote graffiti on it on stage, and thought about letting people have at it, but i was afraid someone would put a swastika on it and ruin the video. My original plan to have an eagle for a figurehead seemed insulting to eagles. I thought turkeys wouldn't care.

The Pirates, which we changed to Space Buccaneers for a less felonius image, were all about natural materials, with a DIY look as if they had escaped to space early on in the ruin of earth, and built themselves a paradise where they made Jell-O to sell to other space refugees. I made their ship first, out of sticks I had pruned off my apple tree. It was supposed to be closer to the front of the stage as well, but to accommodate the tumbling mat everything had to be moved to the back wall. Not what I had planned, but I can be flexible. I had ideas for sails that also had to be jettisoned, suspended on bamboo poles, which were way too long for the space. The figurehead for that ship was a lot more elegant in my imagination but oh well. I am used to that happening as it has since I was little. What I see in my head is usually beyond my capability to put it on paper. It looked DIY I guess...

I had a lot of fun making the stick structure. It was nice weather and I did it on the deck way early in the process. The sign didn't get made until the day before the show. There were probably too many pirate props but they needed something to do between songs. It will be interesting to see the video and see if they actually did pirate stuff. I woke up in the middle of the night Friday night and hated the background for the pirates, so went in Saturday and put up the colorful bandanas and that seemed better. 

All in all, it was relatively simple, with lights added by various people and some nice work with lighting and backdrop by TJ. Hopefully next year we won't have to squeeze in  a tumbling mat. The talented girls were a hit with the audience but it was pretty overwhelming trying to get that to work with all of us humans on stage trying to be at the mics to sing and deliver our lines.

We did pretty well but a week's more of practice would have helped. Lines were delivered out of sequence, dropped altogether, or needed prompting. Song starts were sometimes rough. We don't all sing that well sometimes...it's not great. Our crowd is sweet and loves us but it could have been smoother. And I forgot to get the band on stage before my speech and forgot to tell them they would have to play something while I got changed. They managed, though. Everybody did pretty well for a bunch of amateurs. And I get to have a pirate ship on my deck for a year or two. I'll probably grow beans on it or something.