The donkey hung out in the pasture and was like an alarm clock. Every morning at sun up, the guy would go on and on laughing at the day, taunting someone to get up and feed him.  He enjoyed people and followed them around for apples from the adjoining orchard.  His name was Brewster, and I liked him for his ability to horse around.  He would eat out of your hand.

In the summer of 1982, a voluptuous moon hung over the redwoods in Sagittarius, the archer, cupid. Social life was pumping with desires.  Along with everyone else, I had to submit to the favor of the moon.  The shuffle had me, got me, turned me around and bumped and tickled me, I had no regrets and more than several people during a long weekend.  The only story about the moon I could remember that made sense of what was happening to me/us in the community was Shakespeare. 

All my friends were at the height of their vitality and beauty. Our moon was full.  Alcohol flowed.  Sun burned people danced barefoot at late night parties in the meadows. The moonlight coated us a pale turquoise blue blushing with periwinkle, the shadows spiriting into the forest was indigo hand in hand with black plum.  Couples slipped away from the gatherings at camp fire light.

Everybody's seductress on the radio was Late Night Liz.  Her low contralto voice soothed us well into the night.  Body heat warmed the cool evening breeze off the ocean at the Sea Gull bar.  The music there made us sway.  I got a glimmer of an idea when I was overtaken by the moon. I had access to a donkey.  We all were in the right place at the right time and we were acting out our Mid-Summers Night's Dream.

Shakespeare's play was not quite a Fairy Tale, but it was aliterary attempt at one.  It had fairies, drugs, nudity, passions, craziness, beautiful people, the moon.  I couldn'tresist.  We had those things too.

This was my first attempt at organizing so many characters. I didn't think about it other than the story, it was natural that the characters would be partially dressed or nude.  It was a frolic with not real people, a total make-believe.

The donkey had to be in there right up front as Shakespeare's Bottom.  I chose a moment in the story, where the crucial crazy making relationship with a donkey and the Queen of the Fairies, Tatiana takes place.  Or, for our team, Brewster and Late Night Liz.  Liz Helenchild aka LNL, was our local Texan smooth talking beautiful Liz, the one and only radio station's late night DJ. Her voice came across the speaker like warm strawberry jam.  Her humor was right out of west Texas.  And how she presented music was as if she was right there in the room with you and could out guess what the next song you would pick.  She held us captive in our own homes through the radio on week nights.  However, when she showed up at music events on the week ends, her dancer's body would take hold, people would stop and watch, they would be equally enraptured by her movements.

Liz was in a writing group with me.  My mouth would hang open too paralyzed to laugh at the stories she told.  She told a story where she and her roommate, a young mother, had to quickly leave her eighteen month old baby sleeping alone in their house for over two hours while some emergency drew them away.  Not a particularly funny start, but what got me was when Liz and the mother got back to the house, Liz described the baby as "marinating" in his diaper.  Liz was gorgeous.

I asked Liz to be Queen of the Fairies. She drawled, "Why sure.  What do you want me to wear?" I figured I would ask her to pose with Brewster.  Liz showed up in what could only be painted as a spider web of a tank-top. Brewster was the gentleman donkey.  The photographs of the two of them together show he was rather coy, shy.

Brewster became Bottom, but in fact, "Bottom" was half man.  I needed a really beefy guy's muscular shoulder and arm to carry off the full size head of a donkey.  Doug Nunn at the time was the breakfast chef at the gull.  He was part of the improvisation theater and was into my idea and posed for me, as shoulder and arm. I put a glass of wine in his hand.  I suggested the glass to be tilted and told Doug the glass would be painted to be half full of red wine that reflected the moon that Liz was pointing to as the problem they all were seduced by (a little message of mine in a passive painted voice).

You have always been sly and full of it, haven't you? - Ghost

Oh, stow it, so have you.

Shakespeare's story tells how the King of the Fairies gets Puck, a lesser fairy, to put a love potion on the Queen of the Fairies' eyes so that the next person she sees upon awakening she will fall in love.  Of course, the Queen falls for an ass.  This was such a familiar event at the Sea Gull most of us took it as . . . yet again.  And, upon research, I found that that drug (in the history of potions) was made from a flower, a pansy.  So, I got a pansy and went looking for a Puck. 

Richy Pechner, was too cute.  You would think it the moment you laid eyes on him.  And after a few minutes talking with him you would know it.  He was a playful imp of a man, an electrician by trade.  He brought people together around him with his humor.  I asked if he would pose for Puck.  When he arrived at my place, I showed him the sketch I had planed for the composition I made months before I chose anyone, I had put all the characters in the nude.  He was fine with that.

"How do you want me?  There?" He pointed to my desk that I had cleared for him to stand.

As he was undressing I told him I planned to paint him green and not to worry, I'd leave his magic parts in the shadows. He jumped up on top of my desk and made like he was weightless, flying, coming in for a landing.  I took the photo from my floor, the perspective was as if I was in the bar looking up at the painting and Richy was coming out of the top of the redwoods for a landing.  We played which foot he needed to keep planted for his balance.  Perfect, it took ten minutes and four Polaroids. We had fun and he was very playful posing.  We laughed about the photo session at the bar later that evening.  Others were engaged in our conversation. It seemed more people were becoming involved in my ideas for paintings.  It was as if the new paintings yet to come were a topic of conversation.