Thanksgiving

If you have run a business for any length of time, the odd requests start coming just about the same time as you are maybe going to show a profit. This puts you squarely on the horns of a dilemma, turn away a lunatic or toss away a profit opportunity. Hmmmmmmmmm?

Most of the time, if the lunatic is only a little crazy, like artists, and actors and those wackos in Congress you suck it up and take the job.

This assumes it isn't on Black Friday.

But you know what's coming, it has to be on Black Friday cause the lunatics wouldn't come out to play if you weren't up to your ass in alligator with wild-eyed, screaming shoppers destroying your displays, waving money, and slapping each other around like it was a hockey game.

The Ole Trawler having enjoyed the pleasures of business for many seasons strives passionately not to be a lunatic...but every now and then it happens even to the folks who have been knee deep in the trenches.

The Ole Trawler and the Long Sufferin' have a show coming up at the library and are working like dervishes if that isn't politically incorrect and off limits and insensitive and rude and all of the other ins-

which dot the landscape in these strange and curious times and while whirling furiously and doing sixteen different things at the same time while making sure not to duplicate what you just did and still getting everything done and in the proper order so that you do not embarrass yourself or the library of the art community which has so generously embrace you all of the longs and fruitful years and then you turn around and find that you are staring straight into the eyes of a lunatic.

Yeppers, the Ole Trawler had become one of those.

And there was no help for it you just had to go ahead and be a lunatic and force some nice merchant onto those fretful horns and try to do it with enough grace so that after the holiday passes and there is enough passage of time maybe they'll forgive or just forget about what you made then do.

So there I was on the phone, on Black Friday calling one of the more successful merchants in town hoping that they wouldn't hang up on me and might have the seasonal spirit and might just take my crazy request and bail my ass out of this panic filled quagmire.

Now most of you know all about the Art Connection and what they do and sell and how they offer the art community of Coos Bay and surrounds the best products right here in our own town without having to make Jeff Bezos another million and fatten the coffers of UPS or FedEx and stuff like that.

What you may not know is that they do answer their phone on Black Friday and they do listen to lunatics and they do agree, at considerable pain, expense, time and small profit agree to take on a piddly-ass job and keep an Ole Trawler from losing what little mind he has left.

So here's the job, I needed a mat cut, time-consuming, tedious, exacting and not at all high profit-margin and they did it! Or rather Coni did it and with considerable good grace under circumstances where she would have been perfectly justified to use an expression not approve by Tarsus the Good and hang the phone up. Not only did she do the job as requested,but she also included much to my surprise and delight a backboard.

Quick primer, a mat goes around the image to cover up any mistakes the artist made in printing, painting, sizing or mounting the image and of course to help focus the eye on the image which is what the artist wants in the first place. The backboard is a solid mat which allows the image to be mounted and properly place to make all of the magic when the Great Public comes to look at the exhibit.

I had cut a backboard because I didn't expect Coni to clean up all of my mistakes and I can on a good day cut a rectangle without screwing it up so badly that the frame can't hide the ragged, frayed edges.

But when I looked in the bag there it was. I was thunderstruck, flabbergasted, knocked over by a pin feather and all that other stuff. What a deal and on the busiest day of the shopping year!

So Art Connection saved my bacon and you can just come to the library and see the results and see for yourself what a first-rate, top-drawer, high-class merchant can do to make even the rudest, most thoughtless, inconsiderate customer satisfied.

And a Happy Thanksgiving to all of you at Art Connection, you sure as hell deserve one!