Lost Poster Revolution

One summer vacation I collected Monarch butterflies and pinned them to an old walnut board in the family barn. I was eleven and chubby with a Dorothy Hamill haircut, and my two younger sisters and I built endless Mexican blanket forts in our battered living room and dressed our long-suffering dog in my dad's blue boxer shorts. My mom decided she couldn't take one more minute of an endless muggy minute summer, and she signed us up for the one-week August hell known as Arts and Crafts camp at the Town Hall.

We marched the two blocks to the hall, and opened great mahogany doors to a building more than 200 years old. It housed Selectman offices, the hunting and fishing commission, and a hall with a sagging scratched wooden floor and wire-covered windows where town meetings and middle-school physical education classes met. We waited, my feet nestled in Dr. Sholls, my two sisters in matching brown suede clogs. We didn't want to spend a week painting and sculpting. We called it Farts and Craps and waited with five other dirt-poor town children for our teacher.

He told us to call him "Charlie." He said this as he paced the gym, white t-shirt with a hole two-thirds down his back stuck to his skin with sweat, faded photo of Elvis on the front. He seemed so old to me, to my sisters, to the five other squirmy kids in our camp class. He must have been twenty-five, maybe thirty, we thought. And rich! He must be rich, he collected three dollars from each of us, and he used big words like "disenfranchised" and told off-color jokes we didn't understand. He set a beat-up black tape player on the floor and flicked on a Fleetwood Mac cassette.

Charlie never gave us paper and old watercolors and told us to paint pictures of our parents like our school art teacher. He slapped old magazines with strange names like Ebony and American Film and Cinefantastique on long folding tables, and showed us how to cut out random eyes and words and legs and cigarettes and paste them on poster board. Make a message! Change the world! Charlie spoke in exclamation marks and shook his hands like they were coated with water. His breath smelled of tobacco and lemon and a shock of hair like blonde heat lightening stuck out from the right side of his head.

"You gotta use your ART to CHANGE society, man! You gotta give a voice to the disenfranchised! You gotta bring down the MAN, you hear me? You hear me?" We said yes, we hear you, and we continued gluing dark brown fingers and ice cream cones on bright orange cardboard, shrugging our shoulders at each other, our moms sitting home watching Days of Our Lives in blissful peace.

Charlie started each class with a relaxation exercise. We lay on our backs; legs cool against the polyurethane, and listened to him recite a litany of energy and body parts.

"Power to your toes, power to you toes!
Power to you feet, power to your feet!
Power to your legs, power to your legs!
Power to your knees, power to your knees!
Power to your thighs, power to your thighs!"

We jiggled each piece in unison to the chant, synchronous child art jellyfish, knowing our Farts and Craps days were numbered if our parents knew we played hippy games like this with our clove cigarette teacher, knowing they would call the Selectmen and demand a refund, demand a sturdy woman in polyester with a portfolio of landscapes and pet portraits. We loved that exercise, loved Charlie, jiggled and oscillated, upstream salmon revolutionaries, knowing these days were diamond rare special, life changing, crazy art life-changing.

I pasted a thousand wandering eyes on a piece of red poster paper, kaleidoscope eyes, made them match the songs on that looping tape, arranged them in a circle around a photo of a perfect plastic hot fudge sundae. Charlie grabbed my poster and held it over his head with one hand, smoking another clove cigarette with the other.

"Look! Birdie's got it! She's got it! Look! This is such a fanfuckingtastic statement on society, man, can you see it? Can you see it? Look at those hungry eyes. Look at that fucking plastic ice cream, man, that's the fucking United States. Far out. Far out, Birdie. You're an artist now, congratulations."

Charlie placed the poster on the table, swapped his smoke from one hand to the other and extended his right hand, shook mine, blew sweet smoke in my face. I didn't dare smile, the moment seemed to serious, but I relished that compliment more than any other I ever received, replayed the words in my mind the rest of the day, and carried my art home as if I was carrying the Lord's Supper at mass. I hid it in my closet, didn't dare show my parents, didn't want to face questions, have to make up answers, and couldn't rat on Charlie.

The last day of class one of the girls arrived late for class. She lived next door to me, in a rotting Colonial home like ours, and carried a red bamboo purse everywhere she went. She walked into the hall, no purse in hand, eyes inflamed from crying. Her skin shone pale from shock, and the endless bruises on her arms looked darker than usual. She sat against a radiator, tears falling over her face, arms, legs, onto the floor.

"Why are we here? Why are you here? Elvis died. We just heard it on the radio. They found him dead. Elvis is dead. Please, we can't have class. Charlie, Elvis died." She stared into the space between us, as if Elvis's new ghost walked the hall, and let those tormented tears run, run like the river Styx.

"Man, no way. No way. It can't be. You're right. No class today." Charlie whispered, the first soft words he ever uttered, and he picked up his carpetbag of magazines and glue and left. We walked into the sunlight, followed Charlie out the door, watched him slump to the bus stop. We sat on the cement steps and cried for the poor bruised girl, for Elvis, for Charlie, for our lost poster revolution.