August 11, 2009
Great trip up to the old stomping grounds yesterday. Dan Harshberger and I met at Lowe's parking lot at Carefree Highway and Cave Creek Road at nine and walked into the defibrillator luncheon in the Kingman Regional Hospital Cafeteria Banquet Room at 12:05. Jamie from the hospital introduced everyone and presented the 15 defibrillators to various civic entities, who had representatives in the audience. Tom Erickson then premiered the Exits Exit video which he has been working on for the last three months. Great response, lots of old footage of the band and Kingman kids in the sixties. Anyone who grew up there in the old days is going to want the DVD of this. Tom did a great job.

From there Dan and I went over to Charlie Waters' sister's house on Hillcrest (right next to Crusher Hill which was one of my favorite necking spots in high school because it was so far out in the boonies. Ha.). We talked about cover images for the DVD. Noodled a couple concepts, traded insults and war stories, then Dan and I took off at about two and got home at 5:30. Long day, but fun.

Last Saturday Kathy and I drove into the Beast and picked up my big oil painting, Brothers In Arms, which Kenny Richardson had framed for me. He also shot a tranny (transparency) of it:

It's a big sucker, 36X45, or so, and I had to rent a van in order to haul it to New Mexico tomorrow.

Speaking of Billy, I am still wrestling with the cover painting for our big art issue and so yesterday I did nine sketches of Billy's Overbite:

We know Billy the Kid had a prominent overbite (a local wag joked he could "eat pumpkins through a picket fence."). Still, he was a Ladie's Man, so how do you portray those two disparities in the same painting? Not easily. Ha.

"When I was nine, the 'Buck Rogers' comics took me to the future, and I never came back."
—Ray Bradbury