A few years ago I was tapped to do some live caricature at a trendy multimedia event. The premise was this; a photographer would wander around the event floor and snap photos of the attendees, then send them to a computer, where I would do a quick cartoon rendering. The whole process was projected to a huge screen beside the stage.
Zero minus two hours before the event and I receive a panicked call from the promoter. Some unavoidable last minute drama occurred and they could not provide a laptop for me to "perform" with.
I needed to bring my own computer.
(eeek)
At the time, Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliff was starring in the Broadway production of "Equus", which is a controversial play concerning nudity and horse love. As a perfectly hu-uge fan of HP, I had procured some promotional photos of young Dan Rad, fully nude, shot from the front, softly caressing a white horse.
That photo was the screensaver on my computer, which, when rigged up to that big screen, projected a monster size photo of what I now lovingly refer to as "Potter Cock".
An entire wall of 18 year old Harry Potter's naked dick.
Now sure, that's kinda funny, but then there's this.
I was awkwardly positioned in the center of the dance floor, at a makeshift computer station that consisted of a folding card table and a wobbly plastic chair. Every mustached sweatervest in the crowd was curious as to why there was someone sitting in the middle of the dance floor, staring at a cheap laptop with the intensity of a thousand suns.
And so the crowd around me grew.
Every time I started a new caricature, my computer crashed and defaulted to full frontal Potter Cock. And as the crowd grew denser, and my small area more heavily populated, my computer, possibly feeling overwhelmed by new file sharing programs and the thick air of aggressively fashionable assholes, began crashing more frequently, flashing the crowd more and more Potter Cock.
Every time that offensive, possibly illegal photo dominated that wall, hundreds of eyeballs focused first on the perturbing photo of the world's favorite boy wizard and his uncircumcised magic stick, then on me.
I wish I could say I'd never been so mortified, but once when I was kid, my panties fell off in the Safeway parking lot, so, yea, it takes a little more than some nebulous pedophilia to embarrass me.
