skulls and corn
If you’re familiar with church communities, you already know that if you volunteer for something and do a passable job on it, you’re likely to be asked to do that thing again for the rest of your life. For example, I sang with the band one time, and then never got invited again. Ha!
But apparently I did a decent job one time painting kids’ faces for an after-church social event, because now I’m the designated painter of all tiny chubby faces when the occasion requires it. It’s not as lucrative a task as the hunky guy who greets people at the front door, but I can work up to that in time if I continue to grow hunkier somehow.
Prior to my first foray into drawing on kids’ faces, long before I became a seasoned professional, I was worried that I’d need to learn how to draw 1,000 different objects. But on the first day, I realized that whatever icon or symbol the first kid gets, everybody wants. One time it was all scorpions and hearts, the next time it was lightning bolts and kitty cats, and another time it was skulls and lily flowers (Any combination of those, by the way, makes a cool band name.)
The skulls got me in trouble. For one kid, before I could even finish asking him what he wanted, he shouted “I want a skull! Yay!” and threw a fist in the air. I was like, heck yeah, this kid’s getting a cool skull with that kind of energy. He was excited about it too, and grinned like a little maniac while I painted a green skull with crisscrossing bones behind it. The next three kids in line happened to be boys, so they all wanted skulls too (of course) and I gave them all different colors. But then the first kid’s mom exploded onto the face painting scene, barking at her kid, “I told you not to get a skull, and then you did it anyway!” (and then to me: ) “Why are you drawing skulls on kids’ faces?!” She reacted as if I had drawn a curse word on the kid’s face or something. Flustered, I pointed at my forehead and answered, “Um, because we all have a skull?” I would have said something cleverer, but I had a line of kids gawking at me getting in trouble.
After that, even the girls wanted skulls. “I’m sorry kiddo, no more skulls today.”
I also learned that no two kids have the same wigglyness, texture, or face density. You might get a calm kid with a dry bony cheek (perfect for painting) or you might get a chubby cheek on a oily-faced kid with the attention span of a cat at a laser light show. You try not to over-handle the kids’ faces while you’re painting, to keep your professional distance – the parents would probably freak out if they look over and you’ve got their kid in a headlock so you can paint a decent Tyrannosaurus Rex on his cheek. Instead, you just chase their little hyper faces around with your paintbrush and hope for the best. I could never be a tattoo artist – “Oops, sorry there pal, your little twitch made this eagle look like Oscar the Grouch.”
I’d like to think I’m pretty talented at this one thing in life, but sometimes the face paintings don’t work out as intended. Sometimes a dog ends up looking like a floppy-eared rabbit, and you have to add in scary teeth so that the boy doesn’t get beaten up in the bounce-house later for having a cute bunny on his face.
The good news is that every kid likes their painting, or at least plays it up for the crowd as the new best face painting ever designed. They all look in the mirror afterwards and say “Ooh, neat – everybody, look how great my face is! This is awesome!” and then smudge it a little with a finger.
Seeing as how all kids are undaunted by an occasional mistake, I started seeing how far I could push that. One time I accidentally drew a yellow lily flower that looked more like a corn-on-the-cob, and the girl went on to exclaim that it was the best flower ever painted by human hands on this planet. The next girl in line requested a yellow lily too (of course), so I painted one that looked even more like a corn-on-the-cob. She also faked a grin in the mirror and feigned excitement over her yellow lily. Over the next few kids, I slowly perfected my corn-on-the-cob, and started adding the little square of butter and corncob holders on the ends. Eventually we had a whole church full of kids with perfect cornstalks and buttered corncobs on their cheeks.
I think some of the other parents started catching on, but they didn’t dare say anything. That’s how you become the new Facepainter for Life.