Being a proper American now, Ronald Thompson wanted to visit the USS Midway Museum in San Diego. I came along to make it a mini-Blue Sky reunion. I even brought along sketchbooks, and after a few hours of inspecting the place, we sat down for an all-too-brief attempt to capture
something of our historic surroundings via that time-honored method,
pencil-to-paper:
Thompson was reluctant at first...It helped that I'd brought along one of his
own sketchbooks for him. I'd had it since we used it to source those (
wunderbar) pages that Ron contributed to the immortal "T.A.G. Annual Sampler." He perused a bit of his old work (which pleasantly surprised him), and those rusty gears began to re-engage....
Lookit this incredible-ness. There's no Thompson like
RON Thompson!!  |
| Seriously at work. |
There were digi-pix a plenty, too.
A steamy day down in S.D. After the ship, we stopped by the Bob Hope Memorial sculpture group next door. It's a pretty good Bob, but a kinda crappy Memorial (can you tell I'm bitter from getting cut out of the commission? The artist who did it was kind of a douche--originally it was s'posed to be divided among 5 local sculptors, but douche-y worked HARD to cut all the other sculptors out of the deal). The Hope memorial is completely eclipsed (and outright dwarfed) by the even more heinous Seward Johnson "Kiss" sculpture. Really tacky. And weird.
We got stuck in downtown traffic--surface street traffic that had every route from the seafront to the freeway blocked solid both ways. It was like Comic Con was going on, but apparently it was just downtown workers, residents, and a whole lot of visitors (we heard lots of German and Japanese...
plotting revenge, perhaps???).
But the traffic didn't sour our day--just our armpits. We had a damn good time. Woulda been even better if we coulda roused a few more T.A.G. alums to join us. As Thompson said, "NEXT TIME, DAVIS!!"
