Why I Do It

Boy do I need Jell-O Art right now. The downtown developers just played their cards today and revealed their plans...they want to talk everyone into remodeling the Park Blocks in order to get to trash Kesey and put their shiny building on the town center. I was puzzled at the City Council meeting, but now I feel like a chump. I don't think all the City Councilors knew the plan, so some of them are chumps too. The manipulators are laughing and making their big money plans.

I doubt I can do a thing about it. I'm glad I feel like I saw through their thinly veiled machinations, but it won't change the outcome and they'll soon play me again. I feel like I did when my teenage son told me I really ought to read Machiavelli because I was never going to win a power struggle with him if I didn't. And I didn't, I just figured out a way to stop having the power struggles. I changed the game. I told him I had only one rule that he had to agree to: we both had to be honest.

So we learned to be honest and he grew up and is a good and honest man, and I had a little bubble of life where at least two people were honest. I think that's what I love so much about craftspeople and my world with them, that generally they are honest. It comes with the territory when you work with your hands and heart. Turning raw materials into beauty by using your imagination is just a straightforward, true and lovely reality that has given us a wonderful place and time to thrive. We don't lie much and we don't manipulate much. The people that do don't fit and they don't last long.

But outside our bubble we sometimes get to feel like chumps, because the worlds of power and politics don't run on honesty. They spit on it. They lie while looking you right in the eye, using their powers for their own gain at whatever it costs. They don't care what it costs. They are takers.

So I have Jell-O Art in my bubble. My honest artist friends started this joyful party and we've kept it hopping for twenty-eight years. You take a product that is pure artifice, a pretty shiny jiggly concoction of chemicals that represents the worst fake food ever, and you transform it completely into something meaningful and right. Something deeply expressive, something from your pure imagination and curiosity that you put on a pedestal and worship.

For only three hours on a day when you might rather be with your family of crafters (it will be Opening Day of the Saturday Market but I'll be at the Jell-O Art Show, sigh...) I'll be high on gelatin. I'll be wearing costumes and singing and talking to artists about their seriously silly art, and I'll be the Queen of that transparent Berry Blue and Cherry Red Realm. It will be grand despite the sacrifice of one of my other favorite and seriously fun days.

And in the intervening months between tonight and April 2nd, I will be a Jell-O Artist. I'm starting tomorrow. I already made the first batch, so I'll pour it in the dishes and start the pieces of whatever will be my art for 2016. I'll take my angst about the Park Blocks Pawn Job and my grief at this latest chumping of Poor Little Gullible Eugene and I'll use Kesey and the Pranksters to inspire me. I'll ride my personal Furthur into my personal world of Art with a capital A and I will heal this hurt these Princes are going to deal out. I will heal this bitterness with the sickeningly sweet substance that dries to a tough, gorgeous and ever-lasting beautiful orchid or rose or bird or whatever my heart desires.



They can't have my heart and soul. They can take my Park and tear it up and ruin my income for the season and they can kick me out of my space and do lots of things I fear they might, but I am a Jell-O Artist and I have my tools to fight them and save myself. Really they can't touch anything important and maybe that is what makes them so bankrupt in their suits. Fuck them and put them in a joke. This ought to be a great Jell-O Show. I can hardly wait. We meet on Monday night to pick the theme and rough out our ideas for the performance. I think we might be inspired. I know we will skewer someone, if only in one of those quick jokes you might not get. We'll see. If the mood I'm in right now holds and I can get anyone to go along with me, some people are going to be sorry they messed with the awesome power of Jell-O Art.

Or not. At least there will be Jell-O on a pedestal, and that's enough.