Pulling Punches.

I'm currently drawing my way through the middle of after-prom season, which means two things: 1) it takes me two or three days to recover from staying up all night, and 2) I spend hours at a time trying to avoid the awkwardness presented by the ever-growing age disparity between me and high school kids. When I was twenty-five, it wasn't really that big of a deal. Now, it's getting a little weird.


"Where did you learn to do this?"

"I was trained at an amusement park called Geauga Lake when I was fifteen."

"Wow. When was that?"

"Uh...1993."

"Whoa! I was born in 1994! Ha ha!"

"(Sigh) Yeah, that's great, kid. I guess New Kids on the Block jokes are off the table."

"Who?"

"They're...uh, they're kind of like...an earlier version of N*Sync."

"Who?"

"Never mind. Hey, listen, it's gonna be easier for me to draw your girlfriend's mouth if you take your tongue out of it."


I mean, I'm not going to lament any generational ignorance of boy bands, but that's one of many examples of how I have less and less in common with high school kids as I get older. Which, of course, is supposed to happen, and is a good thing. Which is precisely why most adults that aren't the parents of high school kids tend to try as hard as they can to stay the f*ck away from high school kids. About twenty hours out of the year, I don't really have a choice.

There are a lot of things that haven't changed much with high school kids, though. Most of the kids I come across are very friendly and polite. I will admit that the ones jacked up on energy drink at 3 in the morning can be a little hard to handle.


"Hey, whoever's next can sit down. Ladies?"

"Hi."

"Hi."

"Hey. Just the two of you?"

"Yeah. Draw us hugging."

"Uh...I'm just drawing faces tonight. You know, because there's a line of like fifty kids behind me, and I gotta keep my sketches under three minutes so I can draw as many people as possible..."

"Aw. Okay, just draw my arm around her."

"I'm...uh...not drawing arms. Just faces."

"Draw us holding hands."

"Wait, draw me punching her in the face. Like, just my hand."

"I'm not drawing your friend getting punched in the face by your...floating...ghost hand. Besides, your hand is technically part of your arm."

"Wait, draw me like I'm thinking really hard. Like this."

"Okay, your hand is on your face. What did I just say ten seconds ago about hands?"

"You don't know how to draw hands?"

"No, I know how to draw hands...smile real quick...I'm just not doing it tonight because it takes too long and because if I draw your hands, then the kids behind me will want me to draw their hands doing something too, then the kids behind them will too, etcetera etcetera, causing a chain reaction that ends with me averaging four or five minutes a sketch, and then less of your classmates get one, which means that there will just be more of them around to whine at me when I quit drawing at 5 AM."

"Yeah, but..."

"There's also an outside chance that I'll get in trouble because some of your suburbanite poseur friends will try to flash gang signs, and I'm drawing you guys on school property. So, yeah. I can draw hands. I'm just not going to right now. Smile again."

"Make me holding her tongue with my fingers."

"No. Please stop talking."

"Can you write our names on it?"

"Yeah. Right next to our face. So we know it's us."

"You can tell it's you by looking at it. That's pretty much the whole point of caricatures."

"Yeah, but it's a cartoon."

"Kid, I didn't spend the better part of...smile for me real quick...the last two decades studying facial features and meticulously trying to work out the kinks in my sketch so I could come here to your high school and draw smiley faces with prom hair and earrings. If I did, I would hope to God that people wouldn't pay me to do this, and if they did pay me, I would hope that they wouldn't be stupid enough to keep bringing me back here every year to draw crappy sketches instead of finding a new artist. It will look like you. I can write your names on it if you want, but that shouldn't be the reason that you want me to."

"Wait, don't write my name. Write 'J-Dizzle.' With three 'z's."

"Yeah. Write 'B-Dogg' on mine. No wait, write 'B-Money'. Or 'Brizzle Drizzle'. With six 'z's."

"I'm totally hanging this up now."

"Put hearts all over it."

"Somebody please kill me."


A pessimistic view, yes, but I can say with honesty that, from my experience, most people that aren't artists either lack the spatial awareness to be able to tell if caricature artists capture their likenesses, or they just don't care. I've known this since I was a fifteen-year-old rookie trying to fake my way through drawing people. If I sold most of those sketches, and I did, it meant that either people couldn't tell that I didn't know what I was doing or that they were too polite to tell me how much I sucked.

Of course, back then, I assumed the latter, but now I think that maybe I was giving people too much credit. I think that this is why caricature artists draw bodies. The fact of the matter is, most people don't care if you know how to exaggerate the proportions of their faces. They don't care if you draw their cheekbones accurately and they don't care if you notice that their nostrils flare slightly when they smile. They do care, however, that you can accurately draw Kevin Harvick's stock car off of a picture, and they care that you can write the correct number on said car. They care that you can draw them throwing dice against a brick wall "with all my gold in it". They marvel at your ability to draw a simple golf club, because then, and only then, it "really captures me." Drawing bodies on caricatures, in a sense, is a total copout.

This isn't to say that bodies are a copout without purpose. People do care if a representation of them, regardless of accuracy, is characterized by performing an action that they like. Most people don't care if you know how to draw faces, because they can't really tell what they look like. They just want to look cool. I think of it as kind of the same basic principle as paintings of European royals I learned about in Art History classes, where Napoleon Bonaparte, depicted on his horse, looks like a commanding badass of totally average height in David's "Napoleon Crossing the Alps." Or every painting of the Spanish Habsburgs that gently airbrushed out the crazy underbites and other grotesque genetic deformities resulting from centuries of inbreeding. Carreño did an especially admirable job painting portraits of Charles II without making it look like his jaw was trying to escape from his face.

It's not like this is a brand new conundrum. Artists have been idealizing portraiture for centuries. What does that make us, artists that pull our punches in an effort to make our clients happy? Caricaturists and portraitists are selling a product, so are we engaging in a form of customer service, or are we just selling out in the most base way possible? Are we diluting the art form, if we can go so far as to call it that? I'll tear people apart if that's what I think they want, and some of them do, so I do it. That doesn't mean that I don't feel a pang of annoyance every time I have to draw shiny pretty pictures of high school girls because I know that if I really pronounce the one girl's overbite or the other one's wacky eyebrows, odds are that they'll freak out on me because of the stigma that, on prom night, they just might be as pretty as they get.

I've drawn alongside other artists that don't care about pulling punches. In fact, a couple of them make a point to tell people this specifically, and I respect the hell out of them for that, because that's the closest thing that we can do to "keeping it real." I can't. I drew in retail for too long to not have a knee-jerk reaction to draw people the way that I think they want to be drawn, even when the opportunity to upsell them on mats or frames is non-existent.

On the other hand, people might not care if you can draw them accurately, but they sure know what ugly looks like, and they sure won't be afraid to tell you that you drew something that doesn't look like the idealized version of how they visualize themselves. I found that out the hard way working in amusement parks.


"Okay, here you go."

"What...what the hell is this?"

"Uh..."

"Why did you draw the gap in my teeth?"

"I...uh...you...have a gap in your teeth. It's there."

"Yeah, but why did you draw it?"

"Because...because it's there. It exists. You have a gap in your teeth."

"Yeah, but you drew it on there. That's mean."

"I...I wasn't trying to be mean. I was drawing your face. That's part of your face. It's one of the things that distinguishes you from the hypothetical mean that...uh...that caricature artists envision to differentiate your face from...from everyone else's."

"Hypothetical what?"

"The hypo...the average. What the idea of an average face looks like."

"Who has the average face?"

"Well...no one. No one does. It's hypothetical."

"Hypo...do you think I'm stupid?"

"N...no. Of course not. I..."

"Why the hell would I want to buy a picture of me with a gap in my teeth?"

"Because...uh...because that's what you look like? You wanted a caricature drawn of your face. I drew one. That's what caricatures are."

"I'm not buying this. I wanted one like that one." (points at demo on wall)

"That's...um, but that's not you. That's not your face. That's Angelina Jolie."

"Can't you make it, like, half me and half Angelina Jolie?"

"Wha...why would....why would you want to buy that?"

"I don't know. Why would I want to buy a picture that just looks like me? That's dumb."

"BECAUSE THAT WHAT CARIC--*ahem*--Sorry. Because that's what caricatures are. We draw an exaggerated version of your face. Yours. That's the product we sell. We don't have a stand where you can mash your face and a celebrity's together. That doesn't even make sense."

"Well, I'm not buying this."

"Yeah, I could see that coming. Look, I can redraw it without the gap if you want."

"Hm...okay. Could you do me a favor though?"

"(sigh) Yeah. What?"

"Don't make my eyelids so heavy. And make my cheekbones higher, Oh, and make my lips fuller. Make me look thinner. And I want blue eyes, not brown ones. And put blonde highlights in my hair."

"Okay. Fine. Whatever."

"Why aren't you looking at me anymore?"

"No reason."

The Reign of the Rotorman.

One of the more interesting, and occasionally baffling, aspects of working in an amusement park is dealing with the regulars, the season passholders that come to the park every day. Most of these regulars are junior high school kids who received their pass from a parent or loved one that wanted to legally kick them out of the house for the summer. Of course, after the first few weeks, they become dangerous, not because they're bad kids, but because the they're bored. And if you're a bored thirteen-year-old and you've run out of things to do at an amusement park, the next logical thing to do is to try your hardest to annoy the shit out of the high school and college kids that work there.

Yeah, the kids are annoying, but they're relatively benign unless they're actively trying to break things in your stand. It's really the adults that you have to worry about. Some of you reading this may have read my previous post about the most awkward interview I ever had to conduct, and I wasn't lying the first time when I said that season passholders who aren't kids and don't have kids of their own should be handled very carefully.

Not surprisingly, the crazy ones were always the most famous. I would like to think that every park has them, these kind of urban legends that manifest themselves as people. Back at Geauga Lake, we had Country Joe, who would watch the same country show four or five times a day, every day. There was Handshake Steve, who, upon entering the park, would smile and compulsively reintroduce himself to every employee as he walked down the midway. But the real mascot, the beating heart, the best-known of the regulars at the park, was the Rotorman.

Let me take a second to explain, for those unfamiliar with the Rotor. It was one of those spinning rides in which the circular outside rotates rapidly, and the centrifugal force from the spinning causes you to stick to the wall as the floor of the ride drops out from underneath you. I was never much of a ride enthusiast, and the discovery of the delicate nature of my own stomach stemmed directly from an experience I had as a 5th grader, when I rode the Gravitron, a similar ride, twice in a row at Blossom Time and then threw up behind the bushes into the Chagrin River moments afterwards.

Rotorman was in line at the Geauga Lake front gate every morning that it opened. He was one of the first people through, and he would make his way as fast as he could to the Big Dipper, which always opened a few minutes before his namesake, and after his obligatory Dipper ride, he would get on the Rotor. The most prevalent legend that I heard about Rotorman was that he simply wouldn't get off of the Rotor until the park closed thirteen hours later. This was somewhat confirmed when I overheard a Rides supervisor in the break room explaining where Rotorman's hiding spot was, behind the entry/exit door of the ride.

In 1995, I would have said that he was middle-aged, but I was a teenager, so I could have been overestimating at that point. From what I remember, he had a heavier build and the paunch usually associated with ex-football players. He walked quickly, but with a slight limp in one leg, which was probably the reason why he ambled along at a quick pace instead of flat-out running down the midway with everyone else when the park opened. He had a receding hairline and shaggy hair parted on the side, straight out of a 1970s yearbook. His eyes were kind of a piercing light blue, but what made them noticeable was that his right eye was fixed down and away from the center of his face, regardless of where his left eye was looking. It was easy to pick Rotorman out of a crowd because he usually wore the same royal blue t-shirt that had a stylized "R" on the chest and said Rotorman underneath it, yes, like a superhero.

A few of my previous entries focus on my being fifteen and the awkwardness of not knowing what the hell I was doing. In 1995, I was seventeen, and at this point, it was pretty safe to say that I had become accustomed to drawing and selling caricatures to the point of actually liking it. I had been promoted to Lead Artist that year, which basically meant that I was good enough at making money and not antagonizing guests to the point where I could be trusted to count inventory.

I was opening the "B" satellite umbrella stand one morning and decided that I was bored. There's a period of time in mid-July, after the crowds from the holiday weekend leave, that forms a sort of temporal no-man's land, because it's dead center in the middle of the summer and going back to school isn't even on the horizon yet. During this period of time, the park gets relatively quiet for a couple of weeks, the temperature starts climbing into the low-to-mid 90s, the days start running together into a haze and and most of the employees get start getting burned out. Morale worsens and self-motivation falters, so avoiding apathy is important if you still want to make money. Worse, the opening shift at B stand was solitary for the first four or five hours. I was bored. I had to do something notable. I looked over and saw Rotorman making his way down the midway.

I waited until he was within earshot of my stand to strike.

"Hey, uh...Rotorman!"

He turned his head to look at me. His pace slowed and he began to adjust his course towards my stand.

"Yeah?"

I hadn't thought this far ahead; in fact, I hadn't even expected to get his attention. I suddenly felt like one of those naturalists on television after they attract the curiosity of a potentially dangerous animal. This was a pretty stupid stunt for me to pull, I thought. I didn't know anything about this guy except for the myths I'd heard about him. For all I knew, he was a violent sociopath. But I had already started this. I was going to finish it.

"Uh, could I draw a practice sketch of you? You won't have to pay for it or anything..."

He stopped in the middle of the midway and glanced at the Big Dipper. He looked back at me and winced.

"Ummm...I don't...uh, I have to get on the Big Dipper soon."

"Come on. It'll only take me a couple of minutes."

He looked back at the Big Dipper, and then looked back at me. They hadn't opened the ride yet. He started walking towards me again.

"Uh..." he stammered. "Yeah, fine. But when people get on the Big Dipper, I'm leaving."

He approached. Part of me panicked. There were many theories about how Rotorman became Rotorman, and I had no idea which one, if any, was true. Some of the Games supervisors were convinced that he was a Vietnam War vet with a Purple Heart and a metal plate in his head, and that the only thing that could alleviate his constant migraine headaches was riding the Rotor. This theory would have also accounted for his slight limp.

Another theory was that, as a baby, someone had left him, covered in a bag or something, on the Rotor, and that no one had noticed him for the better part of a day, and by the time that someone found him, his brain was scrambled and he subsequently became addicted to the Rotor for life. This supposedly accounted for his right eye, but was one of the more implausible theories; Geauga Lake had at least been there since the turn of the century, and the Rotor was a very old ride, but I doubt someone could have gotten a bag or backpack on the ride in the first place, whether there was a baby in it or not. Plus, I don't know what the effects of centrifugal force are on babies, but I doubt that they are described above.

I also remember there being some speculation that he was an ex-NASA test pilot who took too many Gs while flying experimental aircraft over Area 51, but that sounds like something that I would have made up when one of the rookies asked me who Rotorman was. Regardless, it made no difference to me at that point. I was going to be the first and only Geauga Lake caricature artist to ever draw Rotorman.

He sat down in my chair, still glaring at the entrance to the Dipper. I could tell I had thrown a serious curveball at him by interrupting his daily morning routine. His polite compliance with my demands had limits; he had already told me that he was a ghost as soon as that ride opened, so I knew I had to work fast. Still, I had questions.

I started drawing the side of his face. Temple, cheekbone, right jaw.

"So...what's your name?"

"Huh?" He looked at me with his primary eye.

Chin, left jaw, cheekbone, temple.

"Your name. Besides Rotorman, I mean."

"Fred." He looked back at the Dipper.

"Hey, I'm Jamie. Nice to meet you."

"Yeah. You too."

Left ear, right ear, inner hairline. Ask him. Wait, not yet.

"Have anyone ever drawn you before?"

"Nope."

Outer hairline, inner left ear, inner right ear. Go ahead, ask him. Do it.

"So, how...uh...how did you become Rotorman?"

"I...ride the Rotor a lot." He smirked. Diastema, check. Damn it. He had deflected my question.

Hair detail, sideburns, left nostril. Try again.

"No, I mean, like...why do you ride the Rotor all day?"

"I like it. It's fun."

Septum, right nostril, philtrum.

"Yeah, but you...hey, smile real quick for me...you spin around on that ride all day. Don't you get sick of it?"

He smirked again and shifted in his chair.

"No. Don't you get sick of drawing pictures?"

Upper lip, top of lower lip, top teeth.

"Uh...yeah. Yeah, sometimes I do."

I heard some excited yelling behind me, signifying that the Big Dipper had opened. As promised, without a word, Rotorman was out of the chair and ambling as fast as he could towards the entrance, leaving me sitting at my easel staring at an eyeless sketch of my new acquaintance. It didn't matter. I'd spent just enough time staring at him that his eyes and eyebrows were committed to memory. Mission accomplished. I had successfully drawn Rotorman.

As I drew a generic superhero body on him, I thought about our conversation. I felt cheated. When I decided to try and hold a conversation with him, I had expected to learn all of his secrets, the unanswered queries about his psychoses that made him ride around in rapid circles all day, every day. I wanted to take a peek inside this guy's brain. I wanted to stare into the mouth of madness and ask it questions. Maybe I thought that learning about Rotorman would somehow educate me, indirectly giving me a new understanding of people. Or maybe I just thought that I would come closer to learning the truth about what makes them crazy.

But the only truth that I had learned was that Rotorman was probably one of the smartest people that I had ever met. I thought about the countless times people had told me, "Do something you love, and you'll never have to work a day for the rest of your life." Well, Fred was doing that in the most literal sense possible. Sure, he wasn't technically working, and he might have had a pretty severe case of obsessive compulsive disorder, but he still seemed pretty happy to me. I dare any of us to be that satisfied with the daily routine of our lives, with or without mental illness. I asked Rotorman why he rode the Rotor all day, and he told me. Maybe the rest of the answer didn't matter.

The afternoon shift came in, and I went on break. I took my Rotorman sketch with me to the Main stand to show my buddy Rob before we headed out to Sirna's for lunch.

"Hey, check it out. I drew Rotorman."

"No way. Weird. Did he sit for you?"

"Yeah. He got up halfway through and ran away when the Dipper opened, but yeah."

"Nice, man. You could put that up as a demo."

"Nah. I was going to, but...nah. If he saw it, he might not like how I drew his eye."

We started walking towards the employee gate.

"Was he like, psychotic, or mentally challenged or anything?"

"I...I don't know. I don't think so. He was all right."

"What, like, was he normal?"

"I...I wouldn't say that, but...I dunno. He was a little off. He was pretty friendly, though."

"Well, what's...like...what's wrong with him?"

"Uh...he's...hm. I dunno. I asked him, but he didn't answer. Nothing, I guess. He's just some dude named Fred who really likes riding the Rotor."

• • • • •

After I closed my stand a few nights later, I was walking down the midway on my way to the money room and saw two shadowy figures collecting cans in a giant garbage bag. As I got closer, I saw that one of them was Rotorman. I said hi.

"Hey, Fred."

He looked at me with only a vague sense of recognition. Maybe he couldn't see me in the darkness.

"Hey."

Or maybe he just didn't give a shit about who I was. I was okay with that. Maybe, I thought, he actually was like Batman, obsessively devoted to a cause. Maybe there was only room in his heart for the Rotor. At least part of the issue of Rotorman's sustainability had been answered. I mean, the guy obviously didn't work. He rode the Rotor all day. Who knows where he lived, if he survived off of government disability checks or was in assisted living. Maybe he was just retired. I knew now, at the very least, how he saved up enough money to afford a season pass every year. He collected cans at night. Part of Rotorman made sense now.

Thinking about all of this now, I kind of wonder what happened to Rotorman after Geauga Lake closed down a few years back. I would like to think that he bought the Rotor at an awesome layaway price when Cedar Fair was selling off GL's roller coasters, but I know that was probably impossible. It couldn't have been easy for him. That park closing affected a lot of kids and their summer jobs, for sure, but that place was Rotorman's whole life. I would like to think that he found a new dedication to his life's work, like building gyroscopes. Or playing Roulette. Or maybe even something that has nothing to do with spinning around rapidly.

Wherever he is now, he was legendary then. We should all be so lucky.

Fear and Loathing at Geauga Lake.

GEAUGA LAKE, JUNE 1993. I was fifteen, working a shift at the Computer stand on a weekday, which, like most amusement park caricature stands, was named for what it was closest to. In this case, my stand was between the Big Dipper and the Computer Photo stand, where customers had their photographs taken by an early digital camera on a template with a hole or two cut into it for the face(s).

I was sticking to my normal daily regimen of standing under my umbrella with my chair and easel behind me, which was par for the course among caricature and portrait artists. My personal routine, however, was the added challenge of appearing as accessible as possible while avoiding the performance of my actual job at all costs.

My motives stemmed more out of cowardice than laziness. I was still in the early stages of picking up the drawing part of my job...drawing, and I was under the impression that every sketch I did had a 50/50 chance of an awkward exchange where my customers had to tell me that they didn't want to buy my sketches. This didn't happen too often, but Geauga Lake had a pretty honest crowd back then. In comparison, a lot of my rookies at Kings Island drew sketches that resembled Sloth from The Goonies during their first few weeks, and people rarely ever complained aside from a wince here and there. They almost always paid for their sketches, whether they were good or not. Such was not the case at Geauga Lake, and I was terrified of getting rejected.

I had been through some pretty rigorous training that spring, sure, but the weeks since hadn't done much for my sketch. In most parks, rookie caricature artists usually learn by working alongside veterans. For whatever reason, the Geauga Lake Caricatures department from 1992 must have imploded; on the rare occasion that I actually worked alongside someone else, the entire crew of nine or ten artists was comprised entirely of other rookies, except for one second-year vet. My supervisor only worked at Geauga Lake on Saturdays and Sundays, and was at Sea World, across the lake, on weekdays. So the opportunity to learn was there, if you were okay with learning from someone who didn't really know how to draw caricatures either.

So I would just stand there. If someone would approach me to ask how much caricatures cost, I would answer them with a smile, but I would make no effort whatsoever to sweeten the deal or try to get them to sit for me. I secretly hoped that everyone would just walk away so I could just collect my minimum wage in peace until I somehow magically got better at drawing. When guests decided to buy a sketch, I would try my hardest to feign confidence during my panic-induced nausea, awkwardly moving my marker around the paper and silently praying that I didn't forget anything. Like earrings. Or eyebrows.

I had ways to pass the time when I was trying not to draw. I would people-watch, and when that got old (which, believe me, takes a while in amusement parks), I would watch the weight-guesser across the midway, another high school kid trying to learn his job like me, narrowly avoid getting slapped by the women who demanded that he guess their weight or age. This usually made me feel a little better, as he was far worse at guessing than I was at drawing caricatures. I would watch the aging monorail make its way into its station, evaluating its status as the "transportation of the future." I would stare at clouds. I would fantasize that the Skyscraper, the space-needle-esque observation tower in the middle of the park, would fall and crush my stand as I dove out of the way.

One day, as I was staring out into space, I heard some shouting behind me in the Big Dipper line, and I turned around to see two men yelling in each other's faces. At the risk of sounding demographically insensitive, one was wearing Cross Colours and the other was wearing NASCAR and a mullet, and both were each surrounded by many more men dressed as they were. I couldn't quite discern what they were shouting about, but I could see their faces as they grew increasingly more aggressive. I could see them gnashing their teeth at each other like rabid dogs. I could see the sunlight reflecting off of the saliva being ejected out of their mouths as they screamed.

The escalating cadence of their voices was made all that much more terrifying by the fact that they were in line for a roller coaster, and when I say "they were in line," I mean that they were inside the confined area where the line is winding between steel railings, banking from straight lines into 180-degree corners. And it wasn't like they were near an edge of the area, either. They were right in the middle, practically dead center.

I remember wondering, as I watched these grown men start shoving each other in slow-motion, how this could possibly end well. The line was pretty tightly packed, and many of the guests were far too overweight to climb over or fit through the railings that were cemented into the ground. The people a few rows away from the action were craning their necks, trying to get a better view of the the developing situation and relaying the play-by-play back to their shorter party members, but they certainly weren't moving.

This was bad. For the people surrounding the two groups of angry men, there was no way out. For the security guards that would be called to break up the fight, there was no way in. This wasn't going to be like the other scuffles, the quickly-dissipating glorified slap-fights that I'd seen while working across the midway from the Beer Garden. This was going to be a vicious, sweaty, no-holds-barred cage match, complete with innocent bystanders in peril. I took a step towards my sales counter to call Security before I remembered that my cart didn't have a phone. And then NASCAR threw the first punch.

Cross Colours took the blow to the side of his head and reeled backwards, his lower back hitting the railing. Almost instantaneously, he straightened his backbone and, in a Weeble®-like motion, sprang forward and transferred all of his upward momentum to his fist in a right hook. He hit NASCAR square under his left eye, a blow that would have surely would have knocked him down, had there been anywhere for him to fall. NASCAR bounced off of the people surrounding him like a pinball, regained his composure, and lunged back at Cross Colours. At this point, it became a free-for-all. The groups of men who had been taunting one another started blindly throwing closed fists at anything that moved. Women were screaming, children were crying, and people were being forced against the railings by others desperately trying to escape.

A paper cup half-filled with lemonade slush exploded as it hit the blacktop and brought me out of a trance; I realized that I'd been standing motionless, staring for a good five to ten seconds. I looked at my stand again. No phone. I looked at the Computer Photo stand, which had a phone in the back room. Closed, as the computer had inexplicably frozen up the day before, and locked, to protect the equipment. Calling Security clearly wasn't an option right now. The shouting and screaming grew louder, as the back of the line began to break up, clearing a path for the melee to bleed into the midway. The fight was going to be on my doorstep in seconds, I thought, and my tiny umbrella stand would be at the mercy of intense, perhaps racially-based animosity, and preternatural levels of testosterone. What was I going to do? What the hell was I going to do?

And that's when I hurdled over one of my chairs, ripped the cord out of the power strip, picked up the register, and started running.

Let me pause here and make the point that, in my naive, diseased 15-year-old mind, this seemed like the most logical course of action. Escape was imperative, and even though I probably hadn't made much, if any, money, there was still a $170 beginning bank in the register, and I wasn't going to leave it. In my mind, it was a hundred yards or so between my stand and the office adjacent to Portraits, and I had to call Security as quickly as possible before the proletariat started looting the Dipper Gift Shop and the Sand Art booth.

Of course, what I failed to realize then was that if I had encountered any security guards, and thankfully, I didn't, it was unlikely that they would have understood my reasoning for sprinting down the midway with a cash register in my arms. I imagine these events now from a third-person perspective, and I'm sure it didn't look like i was heroically saving the company's money from an angry mob. More likely, it appeared that I was attempting to rob my employer in the most idiotic way possible.

By some miracle, I made it to the Portrait stand without getting tackled by Security and thrown in handcuffs. I slammed my cash register down on the back counter next to a completely bewildered Portraits cashier whose mouth dropped open, seemingly having trouble forming the words to ask me what in God's name I was doing. I flung open the office door, picked up the phone and used the rotary dial to call Security.

Security: "Security."

Me: "There's...uh...whew...a, uh..." (breathing heavily)

Security: "There's a what?"

Me: "A fight...Big Dipper..."

Security: "Yeah, we got that. We already sent them over."

Me: "Uh..."

Security: "Anything else?"

Me: "I...uh..."

Security: "Jesus, kid, get off the phone. You're tying up the line."

Me: "Oh. Yeah. Sorry." (click)

I hung up the phone and caught my breath for a second. What the hell had I just done? I had to get back to my stand. The situation was being taken care of. Had I completely overreacted? I had to get back to my stand. It occurred to me that, since the portrait artists were all drawing, no one seemed to notice me run into the stand except for the one Portraits cashier. This worked out well for me, I thought, since there probably wasn't any way to recount the events of the past ten minutes without making myself seem like some sort of lunatic. Which, it now occurred to me, I probably was. I had to get back to my stand.

Yes, I decided, any attempt to vocally explain my behavior to anyone, especially management, would only result in disaster. The Portraits cashier stared at me in silence as I grinned at her, picked up my cash register, and slowly walked out of the building.

I returned to the scene, expecting to find a bloodstained, smoldering crater where my stand used to be, only to find the area completely unchanged. There were no medics bandaging the wounded and carrying them out on stretchers, the railings containing the line for the Big Dipper weren't mangled or ripped out of the pavement. They weren't even bent. In fact, the sweeps must of just been through, because the area was even cleaner than it was when I left. The entrance to the Dipper was temporarily roped off, a few security guards were still milling around, one of my chairs had been knocked a few feet over, and it looked like someone had bumped into my umbrella, but that was it. It had practically never happened.

I plugged my cash register back in and walked over to my easel, where a little kid had apparently used my color sticks to draw a stick figure, some sort of vehicle that looked like a tank crashing into a train, and his name, "Jason." I wondered if he had sat down and drawn it while his chaperone was being questioned, attended to by First Aid, or in the preliminary stages of getting ejected from the park. I wondered, to that end, if that kid would remember being booted out of an amusement park when he got older.

For that matter, I wondered if I was ever going to really like this job, like the veteran artists from Sea World who trained me. They genuinely seemed to enjoy drawing caricatures. Maybe it was because, at their Anheuser-Busch family-themed utopia, they didn't have to worry about drunken goons punching each other in front of them when they were at work. Maybe the last twenty minutes was a good indicator that my naivete and paranoia deemed me unsuitable for working with the general public. On the other hand, I thought, there was no sense in evaluating my feelings about my job, or the seemingly dangerous people around me, until I practiced enough to get better at this. I had to practice so I could get better. I had to. But not now. Maybe tomorrow.

I settled back into position in front of my chair, imagining the Skyscraper falling towards me.

How to Make the World a Better Place.

I think that the news on television should be read by robots.

But we'll get to that later.

I've been pretty open about myself in some posts on this page, but I generally make a point of avoiding any mention any specifics regarding my personal life or political views on this page. It isn't that I don't feel strongly about things, it's just that I started writing this blog (and have been consistently less consistent about writing in it regularly) to tell stories about stupid things I notice from day to day and the mind-numbingly awkward occurrences that have befallen me in my life as a caricature artist. I haven't intended to eschew my views completely, it's just that I don't think that anybody would really care about what I think in terms of politics or worldview. Which is probably why you've stopped reading this by now and resumed watching videos of wiffle-ball induced crotch injuries on YouTube. Hey, I'd be doing the same thing if I wasn't typing this right now.

Anyway, I've decided to violate my own rule. I know that I'm not, in any way, an authority on the subject, and I'm about as qualified to talk about politics as a violinist is to talk about aeronautical engineering. But I have my reasons.

The biggest reason is one o my new responsibilities at work: comment moderation on the cincinnati.com message boards. You know, at the bottom of articles posted online, you can choose to comment on said articles. Now, I'm one of the people that deems whether or not the comment that you have posted is appropriate in a public forum.

This means that if any comments are:

unnecessary personal attacks on other posters or anyone that isn't in the public eye,

making use of language typically considered vulgar,

racist,

sexist,

homophobic,

or in some other way a violation by the standards of the Terms & Conditions,

then I am one of the people that blocks said comment from view of the public. Personally, I'm not easily offended, but I generally agree with said Terms & Conditions in what I think is appropriate to post in a public forum. I have only been doing this for a week now. And I've already decided that I hate a whole lot of people that live in Cincinnati.

Seriously. I've seen some of the most backward, idiotic, insensitive statements that I could have ever imagined, and that's not just the comments that I've removed. There is something very, seriously wrong with people.

Fortunately, I think I know how to fix everything. Except, that is, for the spelling. Apparently, the strength of one's opinion is inversely proportionate to the person's skill in spelling and use of grammar. Ironically, these are usually the same people that feel that everyone in the U.S. should learn English. Go figure.

Anyway, I have it all figured out.

The news on television should be read by robots.

I'm not saying that robots would do a better job than news anchors; as a matter of fact, I think that most news anchors, especially the network ones, are extremely talented. It's just that any subtlety in facial expression or vocal intonation can be interpreted as a political leaning by people f*cking crazy enough to look for such things so they can discredit it. And believe me, they do.

I'm also not saying that opinions and/or political leanings can't still be expressed in writing. I don't think that has to change. I just think that the subtleties of the written word can be interpreted in more ways than speech and body language.

Therefore, in order to retain the journalistic principle of absolute non-bias, the news needs to be read by robots. Faceless, emotionless robots that look like Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Except that the light is exactly 50% grey, instead of, say, red or blue or white. Otherwise, the color of the light could be interpreted as indicative of a political leaning or racial bias by people f*cking crazy enough to look for such things so they can discredit it.

You might be wondering why I think that the news should be read by cold, unfeeling mechanical beings. I'm not finished quite yet.

Secondly, television or radio shows with any bias towards a political viewpoint, especially those on channels themed after news programming, will be outlawed. All copies, digital or otherwise, are to be destroyed immediately. The time slots will be replaced by 50% Grey Newsbot.

I realize that, as you read this, might ask, "Hey, what will this fix? Because right now you sound like a total sociopath." And you're right. This topic is, admittedly, making me talk and think like a crazy person. I've come to the realization that the problem isn't with the left or the right. The problem is that people aren't listening to the news and then forming their own opinions based on facts. They're just listening to someone else who tells them what to think, because they're either lazy, stupid, or both. And the people that are spouting rhetoric on television are getting about as close to mass misinformation as you can get.

This is why this country is currently so polarized, politically. I mean, come on. People are either behind our president and what he's trying to accomplish, or they actually believe that he's a Kenyan-born Muslim sleeper agent that dabbles in Marxism. That isn't normal.

Yeah, the recession has been hard on a lot of people, and I understand that. But health care reform does not make us a socialist country, people. It's just health care reform. About health care. Reform that only affects your freedom to not pay for health care. You're overreacting. Lots of other democratic countries have socialized health care. The rest of your freedoms remain unaffected. No one is going to show up and take away your precious guns. Storm troopers are not going to come to your door to shake you down for your tax payments. Inversely, the Bolsheviks are not going to invade the White House to round up the First Family and execute them, and, if they did, they should have come during the last administration, for no other reason than that Dick Cheney is a practically flawless analogue of Rasputin.

I guess what makes me the angriest is that the American public is being taken advantage of right now, and I don't think that many people realize it. People are unemployed, underemployed, and stressed out. They're looking for answers, so they turn on the news. They turn on the news looking for facts, but they don't get facts. They get speculation. They get opinions that, rife with exaggeration, rile them up and make them angry, regardless of political leanings. The news networks see that people are watching their batsh*t crazy shows, and the high ratings that result from it, and keep pushing. They push and prod the people that watch these shows disguised as news programs, and viewers start freaking out more and more. The rhetoric starts getting more and more intense, further away from logic.

Then it involves me, because the comments under a news story on cincinnati.com, about the opening of an ice cream shop, somehow start with people talking about the economy and ends with people arguing about how we need to rise up against our socialist president who is actively ruining our way of life because he and his family hate white people.

Come on, think about it. That's f*cking crazy.

That's crazy, and this can't keep going on. People in the American television news industry, you need to realize that you can only push people so far before they snap. All it's going to take is one of these jackass pundits to say something that can be interpreted the wrong way, and some Michigan militia of lunatics is going to plan an attack on the Capitol building, or an unemployed factory worker is going to shoot up a police station, or something equally f*cked up is going to happen. Actually, check that, it's already happening.

And the saddest part is, people are going to get hurt or killed because cable news networks want the ratings that guarantee advertising dollars. It's about money. Let me repeat that. IT'S ALWAYS ABOUT MONEY. You people out protesting with your picket signs need to calm the f*ck down. Television is making you crazy, and we all know it's television because the clever sound byte you've hilariously misspelled on your sign came straight out of the mouth of someone who was paid to antagonize you so you keep watching their stupid show.

Maybe if television news channels focused on other things, like, I don't know, the two wars we're involved in, or maybe even an occasional reminder of how totally f*cked Africa is, we would even out a little bit with our priorities, as far as things we should really care about. We need to remember that other people have real problems in the world. People in other parts of the world are starving, or running from death squads, or getting blown up in subways. They aren't whining about losing a nearly insignificant amount of their personal freedom.

So, my theory is that, if you actually force people think for themselves instead of telling them what to think and how strongly to think it, then they'll calm down and we can avert the chaotic breaking point that we're swiftly headed towards right now.

I know, I know...this doesn't give the American public a whole lot of credit for not being mindless sheep. But hey, does anyone remember the lady that told John McCain on live television that she could prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that presidential Barack Obama was an Arab? Not even a Muslim, not even a Muslim extremist, an "Arab". How about that guy the yelled "Kill him!" while Sarah Palin was speaking about Obama at a rally? That's a whole lot of conservative talk radio right there. We're not mindless sheep, but we have to admit to ourselves that:

1. There is a scary number of people that believe everything they hear on TV or on the radio.

2. There are personalities on TV or on the radio that tell people crazy, crazy things so people keep paying attention to them.

3. Television networks and/or radio programs that theme themselves after news programming have an ethical obligation to offer non-biased factual accounts of current events and little else. Some people might call this "news".

Let me gently make the point that I know that the government tends to screw us over from time to time, as taxpayers, citizens, or just people that place trust in our elected officials. I'm not saying that I think the government is perfect, far from it. Even if I lean left of center, I'm still not saying conservatives are wrong. Every effort deserves a look from more than one angle. I just think that we need to concentrate our efforts on concepts based on truth.

The truth.

The truth, as in, not theories that the country is undergoing a complete redistribution of wealth to black people so they can buy crack and abortions with their health insurance. You stupid, awful bigoted backwards redneck idiots.

And yes, a lot of people will come to the same delusional conclusions without any help from television or radio programs. But I think that it's a step in the right direction. Remember fifteen years ago, before the internet was as popular, when there was a certain stigma attached to living off the grid, in a log cabin in Montana writing angry letters to the government? I doubt that doing this sounds anywhere near as crazy today.

In the meantime, I will avoid paying attention to biased programming and continue to take a non-politically-biased stance on moderating comments on the cincinnati.com message boards, even if makes me want to move into a log cabin in Montana and spend my days writing angry letters to people that make idiotic comments on cincinnati.com.

An Open Letter to the Guy who Merged onto I-71 in Front of Me Last Night.

Dear Guy who Merged onto I-71 in Front of Me Last Night,

I couldn't help but notice that you shouldn't be allowed to drive on the same roads as the general public. Maybe it's your sense of adventure or your devil-may-care attitude, but merging onto a busy highway at 35 miles per hour while it's raining after nightfall with no headlights on while you're talking on your cellphone is typically enough for me to lament the fact that you, presumably, are legally licensed to drive.

I've come across a lot of idiot drivers in my time, but I've never come across someone that has made this many dangerous errors simultaneously. I know Ohio drivers aren't the best. Sure, they don't drive like Jeff Gordon on PCP, as Michigan drivers do, and they don't drive everywhere doing 25 like a lot of folks in Florida. I've had run-ins with moronic thugs on crotch-rockets weaving in and out of traffic on 75, and I've nearly collided with redneck meatheads who think that having four-wheel-drive in their giant stupid trucks means that they don't have to be careful on top of six inches of snow. I won't go into any specific rants in this post about people and their inability to drive in snow around the greater Cincinnati area. They know who they are. Still, none of these people have astounded me quite as much, in terms of total ignorance of their surroundings, quite like someone who, say, might merge onto a busy highway at 35 miles per hour while it's raining after nightfall with no headlights on while talking on a cellphone.

Let me gently make the point that, while I don't consider myself to be an advocate of suicide, I can still think of many, many ways that you can off yourself with no involvement of the strangers around you, other than, for instance, merging onto a busy highway at 35 miles per hour while it's raining after nightfall with no headlights on while you're talking on your cellphone. As a matter of fact, I can even think of at least three other ways you can kill yourself with your car, off the top of my head, that don't involve jeopardizing the safety of those around you. You f#$%ing idiot.

If anyone should notice a man in his early-to-mid 40s that drives a maroon sedan like a jackass and looks kind of like Dante Hicks from Clerks, make sure you take down his license number so we can report him.

Sincerely,

James W. Rockwell

The Most Awkward Interview Ever.

One of my more prominent responsibilities as an assistant manager for Kaman's Art Shoppes was the interviewing and hiring of employees. Since most of the positions could be performed by high school students, the interviewing process was comparatively fast and simple: make sure the kid that you're hiring a) seems like they'll be happy enough at work to talk to people, b) won't prove to be a liability, and c) can draw, if applicable to the position. I don't think that I was all that difficult of an interview, which, I feel, was appropriate, considering that I was the first interview that a lot of these kids had ever had. I, for one, interviewed with Kaman's when I was 15, and I'm pretty sure I almost threw up when Sandy Fogel asked me what my name was.

I probably hired way over half of the kids that I interviewed during my four years at King's Island, and over half of those kids would work more that one season because they liked it. I still feel really good about the kids who we took on that ended up having a great time working at the park, because they prove to be stories about a successful hire. This is not one of those stories.

2004 got off to a rocky start for the Caricatures department at King's Island. Despite being in the capable hands of Nolan Harris, we had hired five artists from the same art school who had all gone through training and had either gotten fired within their first week, not shown up at all, or, in the case of one of them, whined enough about basic job responsibilities to make the rest of the crew hate the f#$% out of him. Keep in mind that a crew at full strength was somewhere in the 20-25 range counting part-timers, so this was a pretty sizable recruiting failure. So when Lisa (Evert, another KAS assistant manager at the time, and my girlfriend) called me, bragging about how she had set up a caricature interview for me, I was pretty relieved.

And so I walked up to Security Post 3 later that week to pick up my interview. I spotted her off of Lisa's description, and introduced myself. She said hello, shook my hand, and handed me her application, which she had already completed. As we walked back towards the office in Mining, I started reading her application while we were making smalltalk. I noticed several warning signs that this was not going to go well.

1. King's Island season passholders who a) are not kids and b) don't have kids of their own are to be handled very carefully.

2. AGE: ___22___ (do not fill out if you are over the age of 18)

3. When you interview high school kids on a regular basis, you get pretty used to misspellings on their apps. This was different.

WHY WOULD YOU LIKE TO WORK IN THIS POSITION? I love Kings Iland and i have always really liked drawling since I was little.

DESCRIBE YOUR BACKGROUND AS IT PERTAINS TO YOUR POTENTIAL POSITION. My art teacher has said that I was the best at drolling in my class this is when I was in Art 2.

Sure, misspellings are forgivable, even if the former copy editor in me (Editor's Note: Before I worked for a real newspaper, I thought I knew what copy editing was. I didn't. I can check for spelling and basic grammar. That's about it) shudders when I see them on a job application. But if you can't spell the name of the place that you want to work correctly, and you not only misspell the primary function of your occupation, but you misspell it in two different ways, then we're going to have some serious problems.

4. I know that we aren't interviewing you to put pieces of your artwork up in the Louvre. Having said that, there are many diverse and appropriate ways to transport your portfolio. Tossing it all in a garbage bag, even from a postmodern or Dadaist perspective, is not one of them.

You know when someone on television or in movies comes to the sudden realization that something is horribly awry, and the camera simultaneously zooms in on their face and zooms out on the background? Well, I actually had a brief out-of-body experience and saw this happen to myself as soon as my brain had quantified the above information and added it together. But, being the consummate professional that I was (I wasn't), I didn't have the option of cutting the interview off early, although I briefly considered faking a seizure or lighting myself on fire as a diversion. No, I decided, I should look at her portfolio, in case she's some sort of artistic genius. I had to give her that chance.

Penny and I (we'll call her Penny to protect her anonymity) walked in to the office and sat down at the desk, where John Roessner was working on one of his infinitely long inventory reports for the Rivertown Mining Shop. I introduced the two of them, and he dutifully reverted to typing numbers in as I sat down next to him. She took a seat on the other side of the desk, and we continued the interview.

ME: So, tell me more about yourself.

PENNY: Well, I really, really like King's Island, and I love drawing. My teacher said that I was the best in my class!

ME: Yeah, I noticed that on your app, that's great. So, you're talking about high school, which was a few years ago...how many years of art classes did you take?

PENNY: One!

ME: ...uh...huh. Right on. And this "Art 2" class you were talking about...was it more geared towards illustration, or...

PENNY: We made pottery! And I drew Garfield! It's in my portfolio...I'll show you in a minute.

ME: Ah. Right. Yeah, let's go ahead and get started.

She opened her garbage bag, rooted around in it for a minute, and pulled out her first portfolio piece. Any hopes that I had that this girl was some sort of artistic idiot savant disappeared rapidly, as I realized that it was a series of cat heads drawn on lined notebook paper, complete with torn fringe on the side. She handed it to me.

ME: Ah...so, these are...uh...cat heads?

PENNY: Yep. Bobcat heads. I like bobcats...not like, a pet or anything, but like...I don't know. I just wanted to draw their heads. Not their bodies.

ME: Yeah, I can see that. Um...yeah. Very nice. Let's move on.

Now, I realize that those of you reading this that aren't caricature artists, or never have interviewed caricature artists, probably think I'm some kind of elitist asshole, but let me assure you that I'm not. Please understand that a typical interview portfolio for this job contains art projects, typically completed in either a high school advanced placement course or a college-level drawing class, that show a definitive understanding of facial anatomy, or at least human heads in general. A lot of kids actually give caricatures of celebrities a shot and bring them to the interview. Sure, there are going to be projects in there that show a broadness of talent; a pastel landscape drawing, or a first crack at oil painting that won a Gold Key award, or something to that effect. Point is, most of the people that we interview show us original, completed pieces. There have been many notable exceptions. Again, this isn't one of them.

She pulled out another sheet of paper. This time, I was relieved that it wasn't drawn on notebook paper, but I was again perturbed by the subject matter. It was a vertical green oval with two horizontal black ovals on top of it, drawn in crayon. I recognized it as a crude drawing of an alien head, but, in retrospect, I really didn't have to put that together myself, because she had scrawled "Alien" next to it and drew an arrow pointing to the head.

ME: Hey...an alien...head.

PENNY: Yeah. I draw aliens sometimes!

ME: Really. I've...um...I've always been kind of scared of aliens.

PENNY: I'm not!

Next, she confidently handed me a cut-out piece of paper. I unfolded it and saw that it was a pencil drawing of an elephant, again on lined notebook paper, that she had cut out with scissors.

ME: Wow, an elephant. What...um...what made you cut it out?

PENNY: I don't know...the rock, I guess.

ME: The rock?

PENNY: Yeah, the big rock at the end of his trunk.

ME: Ah. right. What about it?

PENNY: Well, that used to be a baby elephant, but I cut it out so it was a rock instead. Check this one out!

ME: Oh. Uh...cool. It's Snoopy.

It was about this point that I noticed that John had stopped typing and was staring wide-eyed at the computer screen. I looked at the drawing of Snoopy, which had been drawn off of a sticker. I know this because the sticker itself was stapled to the drawing.

Next came the Garfield drawing that I had heard so much about. The drawing of Garfield was probably the most accurate reproduction that I had seen thus far, but she had gone through the trouble of adding Jon Arbuckle, Garfield's owner, who was now portrayed with a lazy eye and a prominent hunchback. I began trying to think of questions to ask about her drawings, just so I could feel confident that I had conducted a full interview once this was over. This was probably a mistake on my part.

PENNY: Look, here's Garfield. He hates Mondays!

ME: Yeah, I...uh...I remember that about him. You also wrote it on here, "I hate Mondays." Very nice. What's next?

PENNY: Here, it's Tweety Bird.

ME: Oh, right on. Uh...why did...um...why did you choose to draw this one on...uh...blue card stock?

PENNY: (visibly excited), Oh, I'll show you in a minute! But first, look! A horse!

John Roessner had stopped moving altogether and was visibly shaking, presumably trying to try to contain inappropriate laughter. I looked at the drawing of the horse. It was a comparatively accurate pencil drawing of a horse in the sense that it had a head, a tail, and four limbs. What disturbed me about this particular piece was that she had obviously drawn and erased the horse's penis multiple times, and at varying sizes.

ME: Yep, that sure is...a horse. You like horses, don't you, John?

JOHN: Y-YES...YEAH. YES I DO.

PENNY: Look!

Penny had pulled out a picture of a reclining Mickey Mouse, also drawn on light blue card stock to match up with Tweety. As I wondered what these two might have in common besides being a "Cartoon Characters That Adults Really Like When They're Off Their Meds" diptych, she grabbed the Tweety drawing off of the desk. As she picked it up, I noticed that it had handwriting on the back of it. She held the two drawings side by side, one in each hand, and began reading dialogue off of the back of them, moving them up and down as each one "talked."

PENNY: "Hey, Tweety, could you help me get up?" (pause) "No, Mickey, I won't...you get up yourself."

(a good five seconds of silence)

ME: ...

JOHN: *cough COUGH...cough* w...WOW.

ME: Oh-kay!....we're good. Thanks for showing me your stuff! Lot of good stuff in there.

PENNY: So, am I hired?

I thought for a moment about how to respond. The normal thing to do would be to give an honest critique of the portfolio, tell the interviewee why you don't think they're quite cut out for drawing strangers for money, and tell them what they need to work on. That's what you do when you're interviewing someone and you think that, if they work on a couple of things and come back, they have a shot at getting hired. Penny here was a notable exception, because she, for whatever reason, seemed to have an emotional maturity level way, way, WAAAAY below what would be normal for her age. I could see that being honest would likely result in seriously hurting her feelings and, possibly, severely damaging her self-image.

Plus, I didn't want her going to the park to complain that we didn't hire her, resulting in an angry inquiry as to why we would interview a barely functioning adult to perform an extremely specialized job involving relatively high and complex levels of customer service. What would happen to Penny the first time she drew a $30 sketch of a couple as Garfield and Jon of Notre Dame? People are only nice to a point, and typically that point falls well short of shelling out $30 bucks for a drawing that doesn't look like them. Amusement park patrons would uncaringly devour her, whether the park understood that or not. So I did what I thought was the right thing: the wrong thing. I lied through my teeth.

ME: Uh, actually, we're pretty...uh...full in Caricatures right now.

JOHN: *COUGH* WE JUST HIRED SOME PEOPLE...EARLIER THIS WEEK.

ME: Yeah...yeah, we did. I'm going to keep your resume on file here, and if a spot opens up, we'll call you.

PENNY: Okay! I really want to work here!

ME: I know...well, do you want me to walk you back out to Secu--

PENNY: No! I'm going to go on the water slides! And the Vortex!

ME: Okay. Thanks for coming in, it was really nice meeting you!

PENNY: Yeah. Bye!

I shut the office door. I looked at John, whose face was completely flushed. He looked back at me. I opened the door, looked out, and shut it again to confirm that she was gone.

JOHN: *GUH!!!* (gasp) How...how did...you keep a straight face that whole time?

ME: God, I don't know. That was completely retar...oh. I...I mean, ridiculous.

JOHN: Nice.

ME: Oh. Oh, man...am I a total asshole?

JOHN: *cough* I don't think so. Do you think that she would have been able to do the job?

ME: Of course not.

JOHN: Then you have nothing to worry about.

ME: Yeah...I guess so.

And so ended the worst interview I have ever conducted, and certainly one of the most awkward scenarios that I was privy to while I still worked full-time in the parks. And that's saying something. I, of course, wind-sprinted over to Portraits, Roessner in tow, to yell at Lisa for what I had assumed was a mean practical joke of some sort. Lisa thought the whole thing was pretty funny, but amidst her laughter, she told me that honestly thought that this girl was on the level. "Stop yelling at me! God, she said that her teacher told her that she should draw here. How the hell was I supposed to know?"

Obviously, I still feel pretty awful about the whole experience, but I still can't put my finger on why. Some things just stick with you, I guess. I'd like to think that Penny promptly forgot about coming in for an interview minutes later while she was enjoying the mind-numbing speed of the Vortex. I can only hope.