Back in college, wanting to live a little dangerously, a friend of mine and I "embellished" billboards with spray paint. Our first target was the enormous visage of a local political candidate. Nothing smacking of anarchy -- we crossed his eyes, put a bow tie on him and a word balloon reading, "howdy". The next one, pictured above, was our masterpiece. Another street level board, we stared at it until the picture hidden within slowly appeared -- and was then rendered in paint. This one turned out so well, it's kinda hard to tell what was there before. Originally, the lady in the surf was screaming with delight, standing beside her equally glee-filled male counterpart. We covered him up and replaced the guy with the classic JAWS shark's head. Suddenly the woman was screaming for a different reason.
In half-Banksey fashion, I won't divulge the name of my partner in proto-tagging (in the event she runs for public office some day) but this is what's weird -- after we did the embellishment I returned a few days later to snap a picture -- and it was gone. Bummer. Jump ahead five or six years, I was recounting the whole tale to a former frat brother and he said, "I worked at the drugstore right around the corner of that! It was so funny, I took a picture of it!" Hence, the photo above.
Note: For drama's sake, I re-embellished the picture to restore the teeth and the shark's pink maw.
1 comment:
Just enjoyed sharing this with Edmund! Thank you for protecting my identity- hope to see you sometime!
The future Queen of the World
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