i've had the time of my life...

all right dude by now it's old news, but patrick swayze passed away today. i'm really sad about it - that guy made both the best and the worst movies ever and now you gotta sit there and listen to me talk about it!

number one, like most preteen girls in the 80s i LOVED the dirty dancing movie. had the soundtrack, had the second soundtrack, saw the movie about 8 billion times between the ages of 10 and 32. (lemme share with you that in the back of my head, i always thought it was kinda weird that johnny and baby hooked up because it was like the gabrielle carteris thing in 90210 - i could not get past the fact that swayze looked way older than the early 20s or so character he was playing)

yeah, i liked ghost all right when it came out. (SAM WHEAT!!!) but for me, it was all about coming out - one of my fave swayze movies ever was to wong foo, thanks for everything, julie newmar. PURE COMEDY GOLD.

no wait, what's better - patrick swayze as a drag queen or patrick swayze doing chippendales dancing with chris farley(r.i.p.) ?!? crap. this may take some thinking.

while i still haven't seen point break or roadhouse all the way through, i did get to see a chunk of roadhouse once a couple of years ago, and one of the best lines ever is "you're too stupid to have a good time". also, a couple of years ago the huzzz and his brother introduced me to the classic red dawn. that shit is intense and fully awesome so you should probably rent it. rumor has it they're working on a remake. rumor also has it they suck.

so back to swayze! true story, a couple of halloweens ago josh and i went out to south carolina to see our savannah friends for halloween, and when we got there our buddy trav had carefully placed a huge dirty dancing poster on our bed, complete with fake autograph from johnny castle himself saying "thanks for the great time at kellermans this year! i truly was the time of my life".

i think it was shortly after that, that josh and i found his older than dirt typewriter. we started writing random silly letters to the savannah kids. i don't know who got our patrick swayze letter, but it started as a fan letter to patrick swayze, and then slowly devolved into creepy fanness, and then joking anger that he may have pushed jerry orbach (r.i.p.) down the stairs. and i think it was the last line of the letter where we wrote "i hate you johnny castle".



which we later made into a shirt design that we sold via hearts and laserbeams for a long while.

also, one year for our anniversary i spent about 10 seconds photoshopping (badly) josh and i's faces onto the dirty dancing poster.



that's not all the reasons i love johnny castle, patrick swayze, vida boheme, the whole kit n kaboodle, but it's a lot of em. and that's all the reasons i'm wishin i had a watermelon to carry in mourning.

WOLVERRRRRIIIIIIINESSSSS!!!!!

all kinds of fun news!

i am chock full of art news today!

yesterday i found out that my art school savannah college of art and design was looking for people that went there to contribute paintings for an upcoming project. so i email the gent, and send him to the paintings section of my etsy shop. he wrote back telling me that my flipping bird painting would be perfect and could i get it out to new york by next tuesday?



um, yes please thank you! even more so when i asked for more details about the project. apparently, scad's working on revamping studio 54 and will be styling a dressing room for an upcoming carrie fisher 1 woman show. and my painting will be in her dressing room.

my painting.

will be in her dressing room.

carrie fisher.

there's talk that hgtv will be covering this project and that us weekly, usa today and other press outlets have made inquiries, and that is awesome. but i'm completely bowled over by it being for CARRIE EFFING FISHER!!!

want a little piece of hearts and laserbeams history? prints of this painting are available!



in other exciting news, my candy corn party fabric design is part of this week's spoonflower halloween contest - i am currently getting my butt kicked by another cute design so please PLEASE consider a vote for hearts and laserbeams! if i win there'll be a great big sale to celebrate!

portland weekend recap!

ok so as you know we went to portland last weekend! we were visiting our buddies rachael and justin (of the ruckus fame, it was halloween, justin is currently in an agatha christie play, so it was a busy few days chock full of fun!

we flew on jet blue, and normally telling you about our vacation wouldn't include saying what airline we used because it usually leaves us super-surly. but omg jet blue is the bomb. you know those commercials where the music is superhappy and feelgood and it just makes you all bubbly inside watching it? it's all true! friendly employees! free snacks! leg room for days! tv at every chair so i didn't have to miss the halloween episode of the office! it was fabulous!

ok so our first day there, rachael and justin took josh, gayle and i to a little breakfast joint in downtown milwaukie (where they live). after breakfast we walked around town a little bit, and near the library there were a bunch of ducks engaging in duck butt showing activities:



we also saw possibly the coolest logo ever:



later in the day, justin went to play rehearsal and rachael was cool enough to take us WAY out of the way to the pumpkin patch. this was seriously the high point of our weekend cuz all josh and i wanna do is run away and start a farm. we went through a corn maze, where josh adopted a lonely ear of ground corn and ate almost all the kernels off of it through the course of the rest of the weekend:



after the maze we all hiked out to their pumpkin patch and picked out some faboo pumpkins - my camera's battery died while we were out there so i didn't get to document what our jack-o-lanterns ended up looking like, but rest assured they were awesome!

went home to don halloween costumes to wear to the opening night of justin's play - i had a pocket full of clear plastic rhinestones with me, and every stranger i talked to that night i gave them a handful of "diamonds" and told them very seriously, "these have always brought me luck". and NO ONE knew who i was, which made it that much more awesomely hilarious. the halloween party following the play was also a hoot, lots of good costumes all around! this worked out well, because when josh and i were tasked with coming up with what the no costume penalty would be, the best we could come up with is "you must drink a cup of pee and get raped."




the next day, justin had his play all day and gayle, josh, rachael and i met some of rach's friends for a tour of the shanghai tunnels underneath portland... can't post any pics of that because they watch that stuff like a hawk, but it was kind of sort of more than a little anticlimactic and i don't know if i'd recommend it to a friend... basically you don't see tunnels you see one place's basement and hear a LOT of references to tv shows that talk about tunnels, and way way way way too many little stories that don't necessarily need to be part of a tour. it was fun hanging out with everyone so i wouldn't say it was a total goose egg, but i don't think i would need to go back to that...

sunday started out as a bummer of a day - somewhere in the course of saturday night burroughs the cat got out of the apartment, and it sucked. totally sucked. burroughs is an awesome cat. so we all spent most of the day working on getting him back. he came home that night though, which is completely awesome. (i was way more excited about the cat coming home than i was that i just saw a basement in downtown portland, by the way...) he came home while a bunch of us had gone out to hang out with josh's buddy jerry that he's known since childhood and his wife also named rachel. this is what rachel looks like holding a camoflauged beer:



that night was pretty sweet, we went to a bar called dots in portland and hands down any place that has velvet paintings on the wall = best places on earth! after that we paid a visit to powells books and had our minds blown by the sheer size of it, and finished the night off with a trip to ground kontrol, this bar with a crapload of video games. got to play the elvira and addams family pinball machines, which are my favorite ones ever, so i count that as a win!

came home on monday afternoon, taking the train to the airport was super easy and highly recommended! the flight home was on-time and just as rad as the flight out, so lemme just say again jet blue rools!

that's my story and i'm sticking to it, there's a buttload more pics of this adventure at my flickr page so enjoy!

notes from work: halloween costume contest

omg guys, i love halloween!

y'all know i'm working full time at hearts and laserbeams now; i was so excited to hear that they have a halloween costume contest! hearts and laserbeams really knows how to treat its employees well, and 1st prize in their yearly contest wins a bottle of wine and a nap on company time. these are both things i feel very strongly about, so i knew my costume had to be tops.

a couple of weeks ago i was looking through a thrift store, and i found it. the winner. perfection. as soon as i saw this polyester blue dress, everything in my field of vision went to soft focus and i heard a heavenly voice say "these have always brought me luck".



it was that moment i knew i absolutely had to be liz taylor circa the white diamonds commercial for halloween.



so this morning, i got to work bright and early and started checking emails. i brought a bunch of rhinestones to spread around my desk for effect, and was feeling very, very sure of myself that this contest was in the bag.


that is, until our receptionist came by my desk to drop off the latest issue of craft magazine.


i couldn't believe it - our new receptionist, steph, had THE EXACT SAME COSTUME AS ME.


"what the hell is this?" i asked her.
"i don't know what your problem is," she replied, "white diamonds liz taylor is huge this year."


"like have you seen steph the janitor?" she asked, "she's liz taylor, too."


"and so is steph in I.T., and our accountant steph," she continued.


well this just sucks! turns out our jerky bosslady's got a penchant for ol' lizzy, too. effing wonderful.


"what the hell you want?" my boss asked "you know i'm tryin to watch people's court."
when i reminded her we were supposed to be having the contest first thing in the morning, she told me to get everyone together so she could judge it real quick during the commercials.


"hmmmm.... this is pretty tough," she says, "you guys all look so... lame."


she continued, saying "yeah i can hardly even tell who you're supposed to be."


she whips out her bottle of white diamonds and yells "obviously my attention to detail means i win, suckas!"


"and lemme just say, i wanna thank all the little people... i couldn't have won this prestigous award without you all looking like crap and i really appreciate that."


with that, she drank the whole bottle of wine and passed out for the rest of the work day.

as soon as she was unconscious, we all stole from her wallet and went home for the day so i guess in the end, everybody wins!

happy halloween everyone!