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Etch A Sketch Art — The City Without Foreplay pg97
Colorful companion to my memoir The Incompetent Psychic
Here I was again as a flower girl to the fun-seekers, working for Rita and Vito at the Tropicana. A job like this in a niche market so specialized only succeeds when money floats around like plastic in the Great Garbage Patch, and can be gleaned by selling something as silly as a fresh rose in a hot, dry climate. Few hotels even had a flower girl, so that this job existed at all meant someone was doing someone else a favor. Vito’s long life of loyalty to the family organization was probably it. — From Chapter 5
A few years after this wild ass stint in Las Vegas, I was in my mid-twenties and working as a receptionist in San Francisco. Somehow I got hold of an Etch A Sketch and made it my job to master it. If you shake the aluminum powder to the bottom before starting the one-line drawing, you can carefully turn it over and make a copy without getting the etched lines mushy. The office only had a black & white copier in 1982, so I wasted more time coloring them in. It took a heavy, red wax pencil to redden the xeroxed black borders, and Liquid Paper typewriter correction fluid for highlights.
I etch-a-sketched this portrait of my showgirl roommates Suzanne and July. Then I created an entire series of cartoon dinosaurs mocking the culture of my former home town Las Vegas. And Then I got fired.
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