Member-only story
Neon Boneyard Museum — But What I Really Want pg126
Colorful companion to my memoir The Incompetent Psychic
1980
Come spring the interest-rate skyrocket crisis shut down all new construction and upgrades. A lot of people were laid off, me included. After some months of searching, I was hired as a designer for Ad Art — one of the big-three sign companies that helped make the city as visually loud as it was. Signage was another industry for which there were few regulations. But budgeting was now a criteria, so I learned to design within stricter parameters.
Elderly gents who had designed the look of the city during the golden years taught me to create renderings to scale with patience and humor. They made me feel welcome in their room full of tilted tables, illustration boards, blueprints, scale rulers and electric pencil sharpeners. — From Chapter 6
The vagaries of fate and an inability to commit resulted in many moves and employers throughout my 20s. Although this job lasted all of six months, it gave me a foundation for a much more practical way to support myself than simply painting pretty pictures and hoping for income. Someone somewhere always needs a sign.
There are no surviving images of my work at Ad Art. I was a 20-something neophyte female in a room of 50–60…
