One More for the Money

So Jules called to remind me (and commented to make sure I remembered) one more paying job that I have had. This one was kind of funny too…

Three of the paying jobs I have had were due to a friend who alerted me to the possibilities of employment with certain companies and I still am grateful to her for that. One summer she even gave me a job with her own little start up company. She had begun painting t-shirts to sell on the boardwalk in…I don’t know where actually, I never did go to see the operation. Eventually, this little venture would bloom into a home show business but my artistic endeavors for her were loooooong over by then.

She offered me one dollar for every shirt I painted and she would supply all the paints, shirts and brushes I needed. So who could say no to that? This was the early nineties in New Jersey so the t-shirt designs were largely abstract and largely…glittery. Puff paints with pearlesence and glitter gone bad. The only thing missing was a batch of rhinestones. Not at all my thing but a dollar for about five minutes of work on one shirt was too good to pass up. Unfortunately, I got bored with the abstracts pretty fast and started painting things like slightly abstract flowers and slightly abstract cats. The owner of the “company” was not too thrilled with my artistic attempts and pretty much told me to stick to the abstracts. I did more or less but threw in a flower or a saxophone with swirling musical notes every now and then.

When she finally had enough stock, she took her shirts down to the shore and set them up for sale. It wasn’t until later that her mother let it slip that the shirts I had painted were selling very well. Much better than the others. And that was pretty much the end of my t-shirt painting career. She didn’t need me again after that and I wasn’t particularly bothered by it. They were never my thing to begin with.