Pumpkin Art 2016
(Sunday Paper, Volume I, Issue 23)
What you see there at the left is a pumpkin.
That's the 2016 Sucich Family Halloween Pumpkin.
We bought it on Friday, and that same night carved it.
And as we've done the past few years, we didn't just carve a traditional Jack-O-Lantern face...we made a design.
This year's look? Read on and find out.
Quick history: Back when I was doing '365 New Things In 2013', I figured I'd finally take the plunge and do something I'd thought about doing for a long time. (That was pretty much the theme of the daily challenge.) So when Halloween rolled around, my New Thing was carving a design in a pumpkin, which I wrote about and you can click here to read. As I explain in that post, with the Red Sox in the World Series, the 'B' seemed like a good design.
The next year was very 'Frozen' oriented - the girls were Anna, Elsa, and Olaf for Halloween, and we made an Olaf pumpkin. And last year I really wanted to do a Mets one and luckily they were in the World Series so it made sense not just in the setting of our house but in a greater cultural context as well.
I don't have hard and fast rules about doing these designs, but I'm not going out and buying stencils or anything. I look up a design on the computer, try to draw it freehand on the pumpkin, then I carve it and try not to mess up too bad. (All of this is after my wife has de-pulped the pumpkin...not my favorite activity in the world.) I've been happy with the results.
I had given a little bit of thought to this year's design but couldn't think of anything great until Thursday, when it just hit me. To be honest, my first thought was Snoopy but I wasn't sure I could figure out how to make his snout with the pumpkin. Then I realized Charlie Brown would be perfect - his head is shaped like a round pumpkin, after all.
When I looked at the design on-line, it appeared a longer pumpkin might work better. So that's what we bought, that's what I drew, and this is what we have.
I'm pretty proud of it.
Writing
*I got one project done this week, otherwise things have slowed down in the writing department. No word back on the pitches I sent out last week. That's the tough thing about rejection - it's not that it bothers me a ton, though it certainly still nags...but it's not knowing when to give up on an idea. You sometimes get a flat 'no', sometimes you don't get a 'yes' for months, so it's hard to tell if you've been rejected or just shelved...and either way when there's no other work lined up it's hard not to dwell on it. That's part of why it's so great to have other work lined up - it helps take my mind off the work I'm not doing.
Comedy
*As you probably saw on Facebook this week (well it was my personal page, not the writing page, so most of you probably saw it), in my most popular post in history (watching the 'likes' pile up is certainly a good way to while away the time when you're waiting to see if your writing work was accepted or rejected), my big comedy news that I previewed last week is that I will be performing in next month's Cleveland Comedy Festival. This is a big deal for me, and I'm very excited about it and that's all I'll say right now because it will get its own Sunday Paper to tell you why it means so much to me. It will probably get two Sunday Papers because I am sure I will write about the experience of the festival itself as well. So watch out for that.
*Tonight is a show in Worcester, at Lock 50. Thursday night I'm hosting at Speakers again, it's going to be a great show and there will be a winter coat drive as well. So come to make a donation, and then stay to be entertained. Information for both is in the 'Calendar' link.
What I've Been Enjoying
*Since I started performing comedy I've been exposed to way more art than ever before in my life. Whether it's visual art on the walls at performing spaces, different dramatic pieces, or different types of comedy, it's a whole world I wouldn't have experienced otherwise. And I admire the creative endeavors of others. I've told you repeatedly about the web series people have created ('The Anthony Scibelli Web Series' won another award this week so if you haven't been listening to me, your loss), and this week I want to share a couple of sketches with you. The first is new, written by Laura Merli, someone I've met only fairly recently in the comedy scene, and the second is also from Laura, though I'm not sure if it's a solo effort or collaborative...I saw it this summer and thought it was really creative. As I told you last week, I wouldn't make you click on something if I didn't think it was worth your time. Both are about a minute long, and both are funny. Enjoy:
Notes
*One more pumpkin carving note - I'm proud of the carving I've done, and I noticed this year I picked up some tricks over the past couple of years that made me better at it...as with anything that you do repeatedly, I suppose. But you still see some ridiculously excellent pumpkin carvings out there - I don't know that I understand how people do those amazing portraits with background light....it's almost like they don't fully carve the hole through the pumpkin, they just scrape part of it away so the light shines through? Do you even know what I mean? It's hard to describe, but I'm figuring that might be the next frontier when it comes to carving the pumpkin - that certainly looks more difficult than just drawing Charlie Brown's face on a pumpkin.
*Friday was Arts Matter Day, or something like that. Kind of cool that so much of this week's Sunday Paper revolves around the arts on the same weekend.
*Passed the 300 mark on the 'writing a joke a day' for 2016 thing. Started panicking when I counted how many days were left in the year and couldn't get the math to work. Then I remembered this was a leap year.
*I guess I can pretty much sketch out the Sunday Papers almost for the rest of the year, which is kind of crazy, but shows how little time is left in 2016. I might have to give some election thoughts next week, which is exhausting even to think about. Don't be surprised if I change my mind this week. Then I'll probably give a comedy update heading into Cleveland, then I'll recap Cleveland, then it'll be Thanksgiving, and I think we're going to try to do the parade this year...then we're into December. On the old sports blog I used to do a top ten recounting my favorite blog-related stories of the year. I think I'll have to do something like that here too...I'll need to think about how to approach that.
*OK. That's all for this week. Happy Halloween if that's your thing. I can't wait until the first kid trick-or-treating compliments me on my pumpkin. I'll hug him/her. Or maybe I'll just let them take extra candy. That's probably more socially acceptable.