In 2005, I had a summer-long job as the creative writing assistant at Arts Alive, a high school art program. It was the most obviously creative job I’ve ever had, and inspiring and fun to boot. And in this post, I’ll be reminiscing all about it!
2001: Artist in Training
First, some backstory. My pal, Pine Cone, and I met when we were juniors via Artsave, a rather dire-sounding art program for high school students. Artsave was the short-lived bastard of its predecessor, the month-long day camp known as Arts Alive.
I took part in Arts Alive the summer before my senior year, and it was largely just okay. I chose the creative writing major, and to my dismay, the focus was less on prose and more on poetry. Yep, imagine being not that into poetry and then having to listen to a bunch of it written by sixteen-year-olds for an entire July. I didn’t even want to deal with my own poems, let alone anyone else’s.
The group met in a stark, cement-walled computer lab in a university building. The artist in residence was this Santa Claus of a man who kept accidentally calling my friend, The Raconteur, and me “Scott and Stacy.” The Raconteur Scott liked poetry even less than I did, so together we commiserated about the suckiness of the experience.
The Raconteur and I nicknamed one dude in the group “Rico [Suave].” He had that sensitive bro vibe about him, all hemp necklaces and Kerouac and profound blandness. He was entirely too good-looking and constantly surrounded by blondes, and he wrote love poems about the application of Chapstick. I’ve no doubt he was the kind to play guitar on a beach while making lots of eye contact with some adoring gal. In fact, I couldn’t help but write a crappy poem about him for inclusion in the AA publication:
Another memorable character was the kid from Philly who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. He WOWed the program directors with a reading of his poem “Afraid”—which was totally plagiarized. He is apparently in jail now, but I suspect—based on his FB profile page that was photo after photo of bags of weed and hundred dollar bills—it’s for a charge more serious than passing off some anonymous Internet content as his own.
One of the two creative writing assistants, Andrea, wrote a poem about the group with a verse dedicated to each student, likening each one to a type of shoe. I can’t find this poem right now, but my verse was something along the following lines:
Stef is the glint of silence
before the eruption of applause,
a pair of Chuck Taylors
found pink and pristine at the Salvation Army.
A size too small
but you wear them with Band-Aided heels
Yes, I pretty much memorized it because I was like “!!!!!!!! No one’s ever seen me so clearly!.” It’s kind of amazing what people see when we think they don’t notice us at all.
2005: The Student Becomes the Master Assistant
Now we flash forward to the summer of 2005. Pine Cone and I were home on summer break before our senior years of college. We were appointed assistants at Arts Alive, although neither of us can remember how we landed these gigs. He aided the mixed media group, and I was with the creative writers. We—”the poet and the visual artist”—were the most introverted assistants. We sat quietly/awkwardly while we watched the theater, dance, and music assistants scream, climb walls, and leap over bars. Pine Cone just turned to me and said, “Yep, definitely introverted.”
The program director was a loud, theatrical personality with bleached-blond hair and lots of chunky jewelry and lip liner. “Go on, socialize, make friends with the ‘visuals!'” she commanded the performers. At the first assistant meeting, she informed us that the assistant positions were “hot jobs,” and that we were the “cream of the crop.” Upon leaving, Pine Cone and I stretched our arms out to the side to mimic the size of our egos. Now we could barely fit into his little red car that he’d bought off eBay.
Every Day a Road Trip
Let’s chat about that car for moment, considering that I got a ride to Arts Alive in that vehicle nearly every morning. It was about as awesome as you might expect a car to be if it was purchased off the Internet. The speedometer was broken and the ceiling liner sagged on our heads. Still, Pine Cone would take issue when I’d “ash” my cookie (tap the crumbs off it) in the car. The clock didn’t work, so I used my label maker to give him the gift of time. It was forever 12:52 inside his vehicle. I’m pretty sure that the engine was just a hamster running on a wheel.
There was no CD or tape player, or even a radio. (“I had to pull the fuse for the clock radio because it drained the battery,” he said.) So we’d have to sing everything, like “Heaven is a Place on Earth,” “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” and “Just to Be the Next to Be With You.” Karaoke classics!
We would also make up our own songs. Pine Cone stepped in a pile of sand, and I turned the event into lyrics. (“I’m walking in the saaaand pile! And it makes me smiiillle!”) This turned into a ten-minute amusement of us singing and harmonizing this simple ditty in different genres (e.g., ’50s doo wop, ’80s hair band, ’90s grunge, and so on). We discovered it’d fit well to the melody of *N SYNC’s “I Want You Back.” However, at this point, Pine Cone knew more O-Town songs than *N SYNC ones. So we just screamed the words to “All or Nothing” in horrific harmony.
We had so much fun during our car rides. I’d told him I want to shrink him down and put him in my car so he could always amuse me when I’m driving, like a little mariachi man popping out of a green pepper:
One day, we drove behind a white station wagon that had the words THE TRUCK emblazoned on its back window, which puzzled us, because it wasn’t a truck. It wasn’t a truck. So I wrote IT’S NOT A TRUCK backward on a piece of notebook paper and held it against the windshield with my flip-flop. We laughed, and the “truck” drove faster.
The drive home from our assistant gigs would be more of the same. Once, we were poised at the mouth of the parking lot, attempting to pull into traffic, when we noticed a guy toward us walking down the sidewalk. He wore a trucker hat, mirrored sunglasses, and a bright yellow T-shirt reading Jamaica and carried two cases of Smirnoff. He stopped outside Pine Cone’s open window, and at this point, Pine Cone discreetly locked the car door, something we argued about later because that would not have prevented the guy from reaching through the open window and strangling him.
The guy wordlessly put his cases on the ground and handed Pine Cone a Smirnoff bottle. “No, no, thank you,” Pine Cone said quickly and peeled out into the street. Afterward, we also argued about how rude Pine Cone was. He had no etiquette when it comes to lunatics wandering up to him and offering him booze. It turned out that the guy was the same one who’d been staring at the mixed media girls downtown earlier. Art and insanity abound!
Nonstop Creativity
Because the creative writing group was so small, I was participating way more as a student than as an assistant. In retrospect, I wish I’d been a better assistant and actually assisted in some way. It never felt like work; I was getting $7.25/hour to work on art projects all day. Meanwhile, Pine Cone’s assistant job involved him always running around, frantically doing things that looked important. I felt too inexperienced to have landed the assistant position—even if I was part of the “cream of the crop”! I’m always doubting myself. I wish I was a cocky fucktard.
This time, the artist in residence was Jenn. She had been the second writing assistant when I was a student in AA. Jenn made everything fucking awesome. Talking to her about all the things we wanted to do (e.g., writing micro fiction, collaborating with the theater or music group to write plays and songs) was like the equivalent of sticking a key in an outlet in the best way. She found inspiration everywhere. She introduced us to altered books and triolets and made poetry fun and interesting.
The creative writing group met in the backroom of a local art gallery and did the following:
- Made tiny little zines (Mine was called Notebook Art: The Function of a Sketchbook, and it resembled a page from a teenager’s diary, with sketches and random writings, and it was held together by that classic note-fold where it starts as an L shape and turns into a tidy square.)
- Wrote short prose based on photos we saw hanging in a gallery
- Created cut-and-paste poems that looked like magnetic poetry met a ransom note
- Did some cold readings of plays (I got to be Leon Trotsky and I died at least eight times on one of the students’ shoulder)
- Whipped up infomercials based on random objects (One of the students and I banded together to market the concept of Nothing.)
The Raconteur even joined me at AA one day as my special guest and made his own altered book page. He, too, was impressed with the fun of it now: “Why couldn’t it be like this when we were here?”
One day, I put on my assistant hat and gave a quick presentation on writing lyrics. I brought in examples of my writing and what I thought were good lyrics by other musicians (including Duran Duran). I also played them a tape of Little Stef singing “My Boyfriend,” her greatest elementary school hit. Jenn adored it; she couldn’t get the lyric “drinkin’ wine out of my shoooooooe” out of her head.
Every now and then there’d be an open mic called a “Coffee House.” (Me, in present day, trying to remember: “Was there ever any coffee actually there?” Pine Cone: “Those kids had a lot of energy. Why would we do that?”) Pine Cone and I performed a song we wrote together called “Came to Me.” I was so goddamned nervous, singing in front of all those actual singers. But we didn’t fuck up enough for Pine Cone and me to give up and lapse into singing O-Town (our Plan B), which disappointed the creative writers. He and I sang so much O-Town that summer.
I joked around with two of the students: 17-year-old feminist Sarah and Jason, a young third-grade teacher taking the program for his own enrichment. Sarah and I teased Jason mercilessly and insisted he led a secret life, inventing Anthrax and selling drugs out of an ice cream truck. They made fun of me for my love of McDonalds and how that contrasted with me being a Libra who was supposed to adore only elegant things.
Sarah was my favorite. I called her a “buttered cracker” as a term of endearment and she seemed to delight in that. I encouraged her and everyone else to buy the Alvin and the Chipmunk underwear I spotted at Wal-Mart and have platonic underwear parties with their friends. Were the other assistants doing the same?
Finale
Arts Alive concluded in early August. As all things should, the program culminated in a final performance that was so good, it gave me art-geek chills. The finale opened with the students singing and dancing to “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof. Oh man, it was just ohohoh.
Comparatively, we writers spent the duration of the day penning a parody of my childhood opus “My Boyfriend.” It featured lyrics such as “I hate my boyfriend and he hates me / he tried to kill my family…” I was so proud that Sarah ended the program by writing sonnets about tampons and touting the joys of underwear parties. I’m okay with having this kind of influence on teenage girls; I aspire to no greater destiny. So maybe I achieved an assistant goal that none of the other assistants had.
Jenn also brought in homemade fortune cookies that included personalized fortunes. I loved mine so much I had to save them forever:
!!!!!!!! No one’s ever seen me so clearly!
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