My wife volunteered. She said, “I’ll take them up there.”
And so I said, “Oh, sure. Go ahead.” At that point, I was still making sculpture and still doing drawings.
She visited this publisher up in Boston, and also went down to a couple in New York City and showed this work around. These pictures were black-and-white drawings of peculiar things. I remember one was a picture called “The Impatient Dinner Guest.” And it was just a picture of a man standing at a table, dressed in a formal suit, biting into a plate with little shards of ceramic dropping onto his tuxedo and a woman standing next to him with a look of surprise on her face. It was just called “The Impatient Dinner Guest.” Five or six pictures like that.
And so my wife made these visits. She came back and said, “You know, they all think this is really terrific, and they sent these stories back for you to look at and see if you’re interested in illustrating them.”
I looked at them, and they were all very uninteresting stories. They didn’t provide an opportunity to draw a picture anything like “The Impatient Dinner Guest,” because it was, you know, Little Opossum Loses His Pencil. And I was unmoved by it. So I didn’t do anything about it. You know, I just forgot about it. I went back and continued to make sculpture.
