May 25, 2004
Well, I drew yesterday, without hope and with plenty of despair. Came home for lunch to meet the plumber. The heat element in the water heater went out again and we had to buy a new water heater ($521 house account). I took advantage of being home and knocked out a color image of Mrs. M’Rose, the sultry ex-soiled dove who seduced John Wesley Hardin. The only known photo of her shows a rather plain Jane looking woman, but all the news accounts of her spoke of her beauty and sexiness, so I took some artistic license and painted her as an 1895 Raymond Chandler mysterious mistress type.

After I knocked her out, I started on a wash scene of John Selman bursting through the saloon doors of the Acme, pistol blazing. Spent about an hour on it and ruined it as only I can. Got up this morning and did some prep sketches and although the verdict is out, I may have a chance at redemption.

Buddy Boze Bell ate another one of my hats. This makes, I believe, six or seven he’s destroyed. This time the little hat monger got my favorite black lawman hat, with the pencil curl brim and custom hat band created by John Weinkauf when he worked at Wyly’s Leather in Tucson (must have been 1975). I used this hat often when illustrating Wyatt Earp, putting it on various model’s heads. I have no one to blame but myself. I left the inner doors open on my studio and Buddy gets in there when I’m at the office and jumps up and grabs the hats off my counters (they are everywhere in my studio. I probably have 150 hats, or more correctly, I had 150 hats!).

An old classmate came by to see me last week. Melinda Rucker Haynes and her husband Bob dropped by the office on Thursday. They were in town for a wedding out at the Wigwam. Melinda and I graduated from high school together in 1965. She also is an author and gave me three of her books. We had to laugh because if any of our teachers at Mucous High would have atttempted to guess who among the legions of students that went through those shallow halls, would become published authors, I don’t think they would have predicted us, or at least me. Somehow that’s sweet revenge.

“Existence is a party. You join after its started and you leave before its finished.”,
—Elsa Maxwell