Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Jan 08 - Back to work!

The next few days we were mainly fixing & decorating the new boat. Pete was sulking as Middle Island was all being scraped and repainted too so he couldn’t avoid fumes!
I gave up on finding funky handles and bodged my own.
Pete & Brian managed to remove the massive useless TV
(very like that kids TV show with the useless brothers- whats it called? To me, to you, that pair).
They finally got the old termite-eaten sliding door out but we can’t get a new one in without deconstructing the boat. Poor Brian removed the wall panel again to fix the mess the door had made, then screwed it back on to realise he’d lost the cat. After he had crawled through the bilges, engines etc searching for her and even checked overboard, she finally deigned a few small mews. And of course was screwed into the wall panel which had to come off AGAIN. Pest she is sometimes.

Brian took us for dinner in Stanley 1 night, and we ended up at a traditional banqueting hall. The table are always round with straight backed no-armed chairs, and Chinese families can pack a huge number around them. We hadn’t a clue what half the stuff was and the manager was a bit concerned about what we had ordered.
We didn’t know why until it turned up – duck for 1 was a whole duck and had us all stuffed! The bubbling pot thing with the side dish of veggies we liked until a horrified waitress came over to show us how we should be cooking the veg in the bubbling sauces, etc.
Another night we went to the lovely tapas place above the Stanley maritime museum which is in a historic building they moved brick by brick from another site. I had that Wagu (?) beef they are always on about which was ‘nice’ but not worth the hype/ price.
They had a BRILLIANT Philippino band doing Spanish-styled songs. They had done most of our faves by the time we were asked to pick one, so Pete got them to do “felis navidas’ which is sort of our song from the 1st Christmas we had together in Belize/ Mexico. I asked for Hotel California as I always recall how that quiet dweeby Army sailing instructor could cut dead a riot in the bar at Cottage colony by pulling out his guitar and singing that. So Pete is inspired to learn it – one of our entertainments in HK (as we have only the dvd player at night) is for him to play & me to sing and we run out of stuff we both want to learn quite fast!

Then one morning Pete woke up at about 6 and went off. I dozed to be woken up by a very worried cat and weird bumping noises.

He’d moved the new boat and tied it up to the cat, so I could start moving onboard! Which I began to do, dragging stuff over with the cat experimentally leaping back and forth from boat to boat.
When I started sorting out the new bedroom she came over with me and it all went ominously quiet. When I realised I went looking, and found her in the new kitchen with a small unfledged baby bird in her mouth.
I don’t know who was in greater shock! I rescued it and sat it in an open box with water in the catamaran (it died and got a burial at sea). Any suggestions? Maybe a black kite dropped it – think they often grab each others meal?At any rate the cats chitterings at birds in rigging has taken on a new level of desparation now she knows there are mall eadible ones she can actually taste....

Saturday I got booked for a bodypainting gig a couple of days later. I wasn’t happy as that wasn’t enough time to order the paint colours they wanted from the UK. I pointed out that plain matt coloured bodies look rubbish unless its white or black, metallic is better, but they did not book me early enough to arrange it all properly. I also didn’t have an accurate colour chart from the strange photos they sent of what they wanted – all they had done was photoshop scenes (a woman in a bikini in a bath, with a red layer put over it, a man in an office in a suit, all made to look silver etc). I asked the agent for actual samples but that didn’t happen so I had to go as close as I could from my laptop printout which I TOLD him was probably totally different from theirs. I knew paints I could get in HK were not good stuff – safe, yes, but horrible to use and rubbish at staying on. Plus in the end I could not get enough to do a whole body AND clothes in each colour…..despite myself ( and all the other body painters, I expect) complaining, the shop only keeps 1 or 2 of each in stock! They wanted 4 models to match 4 new cameras being launched on the Star ferry Pier. We pointed out it was freezing and they couldn’t expect models to stand in just paint & bikinis for several hours. They emailed pics of an all in one shiny lycra gimp suit which made me pee myself, but luckily decided on leotards with short legs in the end. These had to be made to measure and did not arrive from China till Tuesday. 2 of them I coated with bodypaint that night, which was very streaky and not the same colour as it would be on skin. Oh dear...

The lovely NZ guy was on time, but his leotard hung off him like a sack despite his bulging muscles, so he agreed to wear his underwear (we had to sew up a ripped seam) and let us paint him all over. (I had 3 assistants who had never done body painting beofre but were keen to try). I started turning him silver, and handed him over to an assistant when she arrived. Sadly I was not able to get enough of the good silver mixer & powder, so said to do his body with that and his clothes with the cake paint I had to hope the difference did not show too much. I told him he could paint his own crotch area if he liked (he preferred that)
but what I didn’t get a chance to check, as time was so short, was how she did the rest of him. Not up to the standard I like, it was very streaky, and as he had obviously had time to concentrate on his ‘bits’ and she had to rush over the rest of him, his crotch looked like a silver codpiece with the rest of his underwear having far less paint on it. Ooh dear!


Then the 2 female dancers turned up and we began painting them – their leotards fit and were the red and blue I had done the night before. The last male, who was actually a fashion model, was very late and had no underwear on when he arrived. I got the girls to start painting him black from the waist up and Zani’s assistant ran out to buy black underwear as soon as the shops opened. Worst was that as I suspected it wasn’t red at all but a sort of burgundy colour the camera was, our girl clashed beautifully.
The blue paint was awful and continually rubbed off around the seams and joints. 10 minutes before launch the client said he wanted the JVC logo painted on and I reused unless THEY made a small stencil (which they did and I used).
So not exactly smooth gig!


Our models had to pose on a big stage for 30 minutes – weird, no cameras or anything, just the JVC logo in the background – the press were a bit bemused!
They were hustled off, zipped round the back and set up along a balcony lined up along the waterfront with all the cameras and gadgets. Without the promised heaters!
( I got a bit worried a couple of them were warming up with free drinks when they weren't on show!).After a stage show with 4 more models (a wee girl in a blue wetsuit with the waterproof casing for the camera, a guy in a black suit, a poser in a burgundy ball dress and a young woman in a silver dress so short her knickers showed whenever she had to use her hands to pose the camera and let go of her hem) strutted a bit then they dropped the curtain to reveal the cameras along the balcony.
We were given lunch, then I had to repair the paintwork This was repeated later for the VIPs.
Hmmm. Strange. I had to spend a while cleaning off the multicoloured fingerprints all over their beautiful white loos! Still, the client was very pleased with the men, a least, and we did the best we could at short notice....


Oh and the pro photos from the body I did in the UK last summer finally arrived. Must adjust the colours, seem a bit pale...

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