Would you risk exposure to a biohazard in the name of art? I hope you would say no. This fall I found out that my answer to that question is yes.
On a quiet Wednesday evening after the baklava party, I made spaghetti with fried mushrooms, vegetable-based ‘meat’, topped with nutritional yeast powder, and was so late cleaning up the kitchen that I missed Vespers. The sun was high in the sky, and I sat on my back porch musing about the next party a month away, which I was calling a “Denim and Flannel Campfire Singalong.” My amateur band had their binders with “Sweet Caroline” and “Country Roads.” Our first practice was days away, but that didn’t worry me since I felt confident in playing both songs on the banjo. Even the menu was figured out. I’d serve sous vide pulled pork, coleslaw with poppyseed dressing, and baklava. Everyone was bringing something potluck style, so there would be plenty of food. We might even have s’mores out back after the singing.
What was left to consider was the decorations for my front porch. I wanted the guests to feel like they were leaving the regular world behind and entering the campfire. A number of people I invited refused to come when they heard that it was a participation-required party, so those coming had self-selected into a willing cohort. Still, I remembered the spring pirate party and wanted that feeling of joyous cooperation. I planned on having name tags again, this time insisting that everyone greet each other with Howdy or Howdy-do. I had a table for sign-in and an easel to hold a poster board with the event lineup. What was missing was a prop. For the pirate party, Sophia created a life-sized cardboard pirate ship. I wanted a life-sized campfire. Sophia was very busy with school, so making the artwork was up to me.
Before the baklava party, I talked about making a bunch of paper mâché rocks for a fire pit. When Mike frowned at the proposed cost of a hundred dollars in punching balloons, I determined to make the props out of what I had on hand. As I sat in the back courtyard listening to the wind in the trees, I remembered the part of our property that is a New Mexican wilderness. We have a field of dirt and bushes out back. One of the bushes could make a huge boulder.
I ran in the house and called out to Mike, who was sitting in his home office, “Hey Mike, where’s the handsaw?”
He had put it in one of the drawers of his huge toolbox under other stuff so that a nosy Justin couldn’t accidentally come across it. I grabbed it and ran out of the garage. I took the big wagon and Xenia to take pictures. The biggest bush, a six-foot beauty, beckoned to me first. I dove under the branches and hacked away, lying prone and reaching as far in as I could. It was no good. I retreated but would not accept defeat.
I popped into my neighbor’s house next.
“Hey Ginger, do you have a chainsaw?”
She laughed and asked, “Why can’t you be a normal neighbor and ask for a cup of sugar?”
Her husband went out to the garage and gassed up his chainsaw.
We all went back to the field. Ginger wouldn’t get out of the car because there had been a seven-foot snake in her yard the day before, and she didn’t want to go anywhere that might have more snakes. Maybe my head dive into the biggest bush hadn’t been the best idea. By that time, the realities of how much effort it would take to paper mâché a bush three times over made me more reasonable in choosing the sacrificial structure. We had to look carefully since most of the bushes didn’t have a sturdy trunk at the bottom but rather had a multitude of shoots all coming out from the same spot. We found the chosen one all alone, and it took Dean all of thirty seconds to cut it down. He offered to let me hold the chainsaw for a picture. I didn’t want to go near the power tool when it was going because I do have one ounce of self-preservation. I pulled the bush back to the garage in the huge wagon, feeling like a big game hunter.
It wasn’t until Friday morning that I tackled the next step. I pulled the infinite box of Costco plastic wrap from the pantry and talked Basil into joining me outside. The paper mâché needed something more than flimsy branches and tiny leaves to hold onto. Basil and I wrapped the bush in layer after layer of plastic wrap. I felt like we were rolling a snowball. Basil said that we were the massive spider Shelob and the bush was the hobbit Frodo. The end result was as easy to cover in layers of newspaper and plaster as any balloon I have ever worked with. Even better, there looked to be just as much plastic wrap left at the end as there was when we began.
When I planned on making a lot of little rocks, I had gone online and reached out to my community for newspapers and found someone with a paper route. She saved stacks of extra editions of the Albuquerque Journal. I took one load home before the baklava party at the end of August, and my friend Andrea brought another stack later.
I started the paper mache project immediately after covering the bush in plastic wrap. I requisitioned our biggest stainless-steel bowl from the kitchen, dumped in a ton of flour and warm water, and mixed it all up to the right texture for the paste. I ripped the newspaper into strips, or at least smaller pieces, and began. At first I was careful to only work a quarter of the bush at a time, letting it dry before turning it, but when Justin helped me the following Wednesday, we were overzealous.
As August turned into September, I let the project sit for a while because I had a problem. I wanted to do three layers but couldn’t figure out a way to differentiate between them. It was too late to make the first layer with strips in all one direction. Days passed with no solution until Ginger, who is also our mail carrier, dropped off a phone book.
Coryn held it up as she sorted through the bills and cards and said, “I haven’t seen a phone book in a long time. Do you want this or should we recycle it?”
Sophia is the one in the family who looks at random odds and ends and sees art where everyone else sees trash, but that day some of her artistic insight struck me like lightning.
I said, “Wait. Those pages are thin like newspaper, aren’t they?”
Indeed they are. That’s why the second layer of the boulder pinata was made with the Albuquerque yellow pages.
I was so proud of that stroke of artistic genius and so deep into the process that when I turned the boulder over to phone book the bottom side, I refused to see that I was in trouble. The underside had a patch of dark black mold. It couldn’t be confused with newsprint because it was hairy black mold. Did Justin and I do too much in one day and let some undried flour paste sit under the boulder? It’s just as likely that the bush was having its revenge for its untimely demise by cursing me with its decomposition inside the humid layer of plastic wrap. From that time on, whenever I worked on the project, which I refused to give up, a little cough would come upon me. It went away the next day but came back stronger every time.
The third and final layer was finished five days before the party. The next day, Sophia took me shopping for acrylic paint and paraphernalia. We bought a paint tray, an apron, brushes, and a large sponge as well as five colors of paint. The largest size bottle came in a dark brown, which we bought for the undertone. For the topcoat, we chose gray, black, white, and light brown. The first layer of paint covered up the newsprint but made the paper-mâché bush look like a massive pile of dung. Then, as Sophia showed me, I put the other four colors on the corners of the tray until they met in the middle. Then I dipped in the sponge so that it had all the colors and dabbed it on.
The result was an artistic masterpiece. It looked exactly like a boulder!!!! It looked as good as any faux rock that you can buy from a store. It cost me thirty dollars out of pocket but gave me hours of artistic expression. It was the perfect prop for the porch. All the guests passed by it and the fake wood fire my friend Diane loaned me.
Thirty people participated. Eleven people played in the band, and everyone else sang. There was something powerful about playing music for a crowd of people singing their hearts out. We ate good food, sang, and then had dessert. There was a soft ending after the two songs. Some people left while others stayed. People talked inside or played volleyball in the side yard. Those who lingered the longest roasted marshmallows in the courtyard, blasted music, and danced swing or tried to learn to dance. I see a swing dance party in my future complete with an hour of instruction beforehand.
I could have come out of the whole adventure safe and sound too if I hadn’t been so enamored by my huge rock. I just had to pose with it for pictures. I just had to dress up in the zombie bride costume, which I wear to perform Michael Jackson’s Thriller each year. I heaved that massive thing above my head even though it was heavy. I think it was the time or two it dropped that gave me the most mold exposure, but oh, that picture of me lifting the boulder turned out all I could dream it to be.
The cough just won’t go away now. My homeopathic doctor has me on a two-week course of antifungal treatment. After checking to make sure I don’t have pneumonia, the urgent care doctor recommended hot water with lemon and honey and prescribed some cough medicine. I’m thankful to not have pneumonia or a chronic condition and have every reason to expect full recovery eventually.
I know myself well enough to say that stopping the project when I saw the mold would have filled me with regret for the rest of my life. I won’t make another boulder, but I’ll remember this success for years to come. If you make a massive paper mâché boulder, take your time, end your project if you see mold, and whatever you do, don’t use a bush.
