How to Overdose on Puff Paints…

It’s easy, really. Just make 500 invitations for your boss’s “Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow” party (celebrating her new hair extensions; yes, ONLY in L.A.!)… BY HAND. You, too, will overdose on bright pink and orange neon puff paint fumes. I know you’re laughing at the thought of such a thing, but it’s true…

So I just finished the invites… and I can barely type this, my hand hurts so much from those blasted puff paints. At times like this, I wish I were ambidextrous.

And you know how I thought each bottle would cover about five invites? I was wrong. Three invites. Tops. Plus, then there was the drying time… And the rushing-back-to-the-store-for-more time. (The first Michael’s ran out of neon, so I had to go to a couple other ones all over town. Fun. But at least I get reimbursed for mileage.)

So did the senior citizens help me out…? You bet they did. They loved it! They said it was a nice change from making “50th Wedding Anniversary” and “75th Birthday” invitations for their friends. And they loooooooooved Chloe’s hair (believe it or not!) and asked me 101 questions about hair extensions. Most of them thought it was pretty frivolous (as did I), yet they were also intrigued: “Why would someone want to extend their hair?” Good question… “That’s an… interesting hair color choice.” That’s one word for it. “Is that hair real?!” Supposedly… They also loved all the neon puff paint colors; I love senior citizens.

For the next several hours, about fifteen women (and one man) and I puff painted our little hearts out. I insisted on paying them with petty cash (I’d make up an excuse to Chloe later; perhaps I’d have to “lose” a grocery receipt, or something), but they insisted on not taking a dime (something sooooo, sooooo rare in L.A.). Instead, I promised to come help them with some crochet and knitting projects sometime soon (though I’ve never picked up a needle). (I also promised myself to drop off some cookies or brownies for them even sooner.)

I got home around midnight and safely stowed the invites away until morning. I went to bed… only to be awakened around 1 a.m. by my cell. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” started playing, full-blast; my ringtone for Chloe. Uh. I pick up…

“Avery?!” she shouted. Fuck, dudette, settle down. “I didn’t get it!” Get what…?! Shit, I couldn’t remember what she was referencing. Oh… the audition. She started crying. I told her I’d be right over…

I arrived at Chloe’s, proudly holding the 500 invites in my hand as I walked up to the house. She opened the door before I could even ring the bell… only, I didn’t recognize her under her tear-stained face and messy hair… Wait… her hair…! “They wanted someone with shorter hair!” she wailed. I then looked at her. Her hair was a mess – and SHORT. Her hair extensions were now IN HER HAND. WTF?! “Cancel the party,” she said, covering her face with her hands and motioning for me to come in. I stared at the invitations in my hand forlornly as I followed her inside.

Did I ever tell you how much I hate this job?

Puff paints, anyone?

Okay, so feeling a bit better, so here goes (thank you for the well wishes, by the way)…

Chloe’s “Tell me to break a leg” kept repeating in my head. The sinister, mean part of me I’ve never known was wishing she’d break a leg, literally, but then I immediately thought of how I’d then have to wait on her, hand and foot, and quickly erased the wish from my head. Instead, I got into my beat-up old car, which felt very shunned by the Lexuses all around it, and drove to Michael’s craft store.

I skimmed the puff paints aisle (Did you know there was one? I didn’t think so! It’s actually half of one, but still; way too many puff paints for my tastes). “Is it for a science project, dear?” the 65-year-old-ish woman wearing a Michael’s apron and neon pink lipstick asked. (WHY do older women wear these overly bright lipsticks? And, Estee Lauder and Clinique, why do you even make them? Which came first — the bright lipstick, or the old lady requesting it?) “No, not for me,” I said. “Because if it is, we ran out of all the planetary colors.” Did Chloe want “planetary”? And what does that even mean…? For no reason at all, I found myself asking the woman this very thing. “Oh, you know – the blues, the reds… all the bold colors of the Earth–” she answered. “I see,” I replied, cutting her off. “No, not planetary. More like… neon pink and orange,” I added. “Like your lipstick,” I wanted to say. But I didn’t. “Oh, for an alien planetary theme?” she wondered. Um… no. “Sure,” I said. She then helped me pick and choose the best and brightest colors imaginable as she told me how much fun puff paints were. Really? She said that down at the Senior Center, they did lots of “puff paint work.” Who knew?

By the way – who knew puff paints could be so expensive? For five-hundred invitations, Ms. Michael’s suggested 100 little bottles. I thought this was a bit extreme, so I went with 50; I could always come back before they closed, once I started the invites and saw how many invites one bottle got me, right?

I decided that although I could do the invites at my house, would I really get them done? I find home to be the last place to be disciplined, ya know? And I could do them at Chloe’s, but why would I? Besides, things were still weird between me and Dean, so… Anticipating the soon-to-come hand, puff paint pain, I did the next best thing (I think I was inspired by Ms. Michael’s): went down to the nearest Senior Center and asked if they’d like a new project…

Sick…

…so my post is delayed. But will update soon…

 

 

 

 

A.

Five-hundred hand-made invitations, Part II…

After the initial twenty invites, I did twenty more… and then I swore my hand was going to fall off. I drove to a Kinko’s (don’t you love how they’re twenty-four hours?!) and showed them the invites… and the precise way Chloe wanted the calligraphy done. And then they the nice man behind the counter said the magic words: “We can do these.” I couldn’t remember the last time I was this happy… until he added, “By Saturday.” Um… that was the end of the week. Not overnight like Chloe wanted. Fuck. I asked him if I could get a stamp made, instead. I spent the next hour saying, “Not quite,” and “Close, but…” – none seemed quite calligraphy enough. Several fonts later, I landed on one that looked pretty damn good. Manny, the Kinko’s guy, was understaffed, so he said he could get it done by 4 a.m. I decided to go home and sleep ‘til five (I know, splurging!)…

I woke up at 6 (oops) and raced to Kinko’s to get the stamper. It was perfect… or nearly perfect… Until, in my quite sleepy state, I started stamping crookedly and accidentally smudging the ink as my hand would rest on said invite… Believe it or not, stamping is exhausting… it’s an art in and of itself.

By 9 a.m., I was not nearly done and Chloe started calling and texting up a storm. At first, I didn’t answer… you know the old trick – ignore it and it’ll go away. But, in this case, Chloe does not go away. I finally answer… she asks me to come right over. I say I was just finishing the last few (209, cough, cough) invites. She says I can finish them at the house, she needs me to watch Spring and Summer for the morning… as she has an audition. (Finally! I think… but don’t say this aloud, of course.) I say no problem and head over… 

I arrive and Chloe races out of the house in next to nothing… what kind of audition is this? But I don’t ask; I figure she’ll tell me later, whether I want to know or not. As she’s getting into one of the Lexuses (Lexii?), she asks to see the invites. All of them? Shit… “Just one,” she says. I show her… and it happens to be one of the crooked ones. Fuck. “Oops,” I say, quickly snatching it back. I show another, one of the ones I actually did by hand…

(By the way… Why didn’t I just tell her handwriting all 500 in one night was impossible? What was I afraid of… that she’d fire me? And what was a new boss going to do, get mad at me when I told him the reason for leaving my last job was, “Couldn’t handwrite five hundred invitations in roughly eighteen hours”?)

She looks at it, says she doesn’t like it (“But it’s my fault, not yours”), and that she’d like me to use colorful puff paints on each one, instead. WTF? Puff paints? Did she just turn into her eight-year-old daughter?… Or maybe the six-year-old one…?

Now, do I tell her I still had a good two hundred-ish to finish – and we could do those in puff paint, leaving the other 291 alone? Hmm… But then she’d know I didn’t finish the job… “May as well re-do them all,” she says as she drives off. “Tell me to break a leg,” she yells as she’s down the driveway. “Break a leg,” I mutter to myself, wondering when I signed up to be in this horrid arts and crafts class…

Five-hundred hand-made invitations, Part I…

Okay, so fifty pictures of each of the ten headshots… no big deal, right? And what’s a little calligraphy on each one, inviting them all to her “Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow” party? It shouldn’t take me that long… right?

Wrong. So very, verrrry wrong.

And the best part was, she wanted me to do this overnight. Was she f’ing kidding me?! My hand started hurting after doing about twenty of the invites. (I never knew my hand was so out of shape.) I thought about how I could cheat… Could I make a stamp in calligraphy font and use that? But would it look real enough? What if one came back in the mail and she was able to notice that it wouldn’t smudge like regular calligraphy ink? Or could I pay someone else to do them for me? Or maybe I could teach my friends calligraphy (I can see my mass email now: “Learn calligraphy for FREE in just ten easy steps!”) and have them each do a few? My mind started racing for a solution…