The day of March 21st started out with great potential, that is before the students showed up ;).  Oh well, I suppose they can't all be lazy days of March.  First to truck in were Dean and Chris straight in from the West coast (of Florida that is).   The brutal drive in from Tampa did nothing to dispel their generally positive attitude (as long as you aren't telling on them for dumping plaster in the street).  It was just a notion but Dean and Chris seemed to know each other prior to taking the class.  I was clued in by either the matching t-shirts or the fact that they work, eat, make haunted houses, enjoy the same hobbies, tour conventions together and share the same sense of humor (and toothbrush),

Most of the rest of the class came shuffling in shortly thereafter.  I did say MOST.  Tosha came straggling in an hour late due to the NYC cab driver who hadn't realized he wasn't in NYC anymore and couldn't find the place.  Plus, he wouldn't go near her hotel, for fear of his life.  Ian hails from LA.  In LA, the locals assume if something starts on a particular date/time, you schedule your flight to coincide with the lunch break.  Ian's taxi arrived 3 hours later (we'll get to the bus incident soon enough ;) )

Now that everyone was in place and ready to go it was time to um ah, sculpt, no.  It was time to cut the heads off the armatures.  There is an ancient tradition among mask makers to chop the heads off your foam armatures (don't try this with a plaster one).  Why?  Well, you'll have to take the seminar to find out.  Unfortunately, the only tools available were a dull butter knife, some vaseline and one of those saws with that annoying bar running across the back.   We chose the latter and went to work.  Well, I chose the latter and they went to work.  Actually, they all claimed they were lame carpenters, so they chose the latter and I went to work.  Whew!  When it was done, we had 8 armatures, 8 heads and no way to reattach them.  I sent everyone home.  Oh, wait.  I had some PVC, some chewed bubble gum and a bit of spackle.  Before we were done, they were just like new, except the heads had been cut off and reattached (all in a days work).

Now, we were ready to get down to business.  I pretended to do a sculpting demo, but in reality I diverted their attention and pulled out a predone sculpture by Lee Romaire from under the table.  Of course I took full credit for the work.  Once finished with my admittedly lame demo (hey, you try sculpting something from above and behind the back of the head), I unleashed the class upon the clay, with my fleeting words of, "cover your armature with the provided plastic bag to ease all of our suffering come demolding time."  Of course Barry heard these words, he just chose to ignore them unlike the rest of the well behaved, attentive, order following class (right Barry!).

Now it was time to separate the men from the boys and to separate a few of the men from Tosha.   Sculpting went about as well as could be expected.  Actually, it went alot better than expected.  I was able to get in a four hour nap, which is always better than expected.  Before lunch, Barry had finished his first sculpt and was onto numbers 2,3,4 and 8.  Thankfully, he had whipped out the first one in record time because I had nothing to do a molding demo with the next day and really didn't not want to mold Lee... oops MY molding demo sculpt.

After lunch (and Barry's 3rd sculpt), Ian decided to make an appearance.  He quickly got up to speed on what the heck we were doing and just why Quintin had to take the only other table available to support his 4 tackle boxes of equipment while Ian sculpted on a TV tray (that contained my lunch no less).  Ian was positive he could whip out a Predator in the 38 minutes he had left to sculpt.  I had my doubts, but being the nice guy that I am, I let him give it a shot (I hate it when those young whipper snappers prove me wrong).

The rest of the day was spent pushing clay and getting some sculpting done.  We finally heard the first few words from Johnny and they weren't pleasant.  He was expecting Da Vinci type results, but was disappointed to only sculpt up to Joe Lester's standards.  Never the less, Johnny was Hell bent on improving and he sure made a nice looking final product.

Eddie spends his weekends lifting 500lb men off the mat and throwing them into chairs, but he had the patience and soft hands to work out the form of one of the best beginners Myers I've ever seen.  He did threaten to put my neck in a scissors hold until I, "turned a nice shade of blue green and could only speak in inaudible grunts" if I didn't mention this fact.

Day one was finally over.  I woke up from my nap and shuffled them out the door for day two.

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