Paint your way to a better future

Another blast from the past, courtesy of Facebook. And, another thing that had less significance to me than the other person. In this case Bill, a friend from the college days, emailed his favorite memory.

Bill, Tom and I were freshmen and had joined the same small organization on campus. Tom came back from classes one day with a flyer about the upcoming Sigma Sigma Carnival. Sigma Sigma is an honorary organization at the University of Cincinnati that recognizes students who make significant contributions to life at the university. Part of their funding comes from the annual carnival. It consists of booths put up by numerous other organizations. Their incentive is the competition for generating the most income with whatever product, game, etc. their booths offer.

Tom suggested that we enter the competition. We enthusiastically went before our organization’s council to propose that and got slam dunked. We’re small. We don’t have a chance against the big organizations. They have all kinds of resources and always put up elaborate stuff. Forget it. Waste of time and money.

We left the meeting deflated and stood in the outer hall. “Heck with them,” I said. May not be an exact quote. “Let’s just do it. We’ll kick butt. If they want the trophy, they can reimburse us.” I said it as fervently as I could to catch up Bill and Tom in the emotion. They told me to get lost. May not be an exact quote.

I talked them into coming up to my room and pulled out a pencil to write ideas on the wall. This was the college years. “Forget about booth ideas. What gets everyone excited? If we can’t take the competition with bucks, let’s outthink them.”

It was the late 60s. The summer of love. Tie-dyed shirts and bellbottoms. Black light posters. Strobes. UC was a little closer to the mainstream of the movement than Quakers, but the student body was anxious to get into the swim. How could we help them?

I suggested that the buzz word for the booth be psychedelic. Tom proposed we sell LSD. I didn’t see myself signing the entry form, taking responsibility for that. Had “Exhibit A” written all over it. Didn’t believe in messing with brain chemistry anyway, except maybe with some 3.2 beer.

I won’t go through the details of the thought process, but the basic strategy was to beat the budget constraints by taking something prosaic and dressing it up as psychedelic. Almost every cornball carnival I had seen around that era had a “paint booth.” That is, a trash can with an electric motor in it. The motor had a frame on it that would spin a piece of white cardboard. There were plastic squeeze bottles (the kind you see in restaurants for ketchup and mustard) that held paint of various colors. The patron would hit the switch to spin the cardboard and then squirt paint onto it. The motion would spread the paint in spiraling patterns. What I rechristened, psychedelic patterns.

It wasn’t just that. I recalled this as being addictive. You’d crank out one and want to try to do better on the next. And, the next. And, the next.

For a backdrop, we found a used piece of canvas and painted a pink and black spiral on it. The sign was a board painted flat black. We glued sugar cubes on it for the lettering. Tom got his LSD reference after all.

There were 70 booths. Of that, 69 finished behind us.

It was good to win, but not all that big of a deal to me. Apparently, not so for Bill.

In his recent email, he said it was a turning point in his life. From then on, he never assumed something couldn’t be done and he’s been pretty successful and happy as a result.

Okay, now it’s a big deal to me.