The Honeymoon

The first year at Image International was truly amazing. Looking back on it, I can see what went on. Al Caputo and Ray Ramsay, the owners, saw me in action and realized that they suddenly had the talent in the shop to build some really cool stuff. Al Ohlson, I soon learned, was completely lost when the project went off square - He gave me all projects that required a mind for three dimensional geometry that didn't have standard thirty, sixty or forty five degrees coming back around to zero in a hurry. The Pirate entranceway was my first solo project, without a square corner anywhere, but five pieces came together square. He showed me the picture, and I built it. He tried to assure me that I didn't really need to figure all of those angles, that I could cut everything square and it would be okay. I scowled at him and built it right. Caputo liked it.

High Tech Aztec was all about angles. Al Ohlson gave me the project of the two square stepped pyramids that needed to come apart into four pieces along the corners, requiring the figuring of the forty five degree ends that would attach together into the square. I knew how to work it out, but Al argued with me every time I tried to lay it out. He didn't have a clue how to make it work, and didn't trust that I could figure it out. He tried to make the corners by modifying the square-on stringers, and I couldn't make him see that the step widths were going to stretch to nearly one and a half times when measured across the 45 degree angle. Finally one day Al Ohlson took a day off and I laid out and built one whole unit while he was gone, with angle stringers and square-on stringers traced for the second one. The bar units were wacky angles as well. Bob had that project, and after about three days of struggling with it, came to me and asked how to work it out. I pretty much built the first one for him, and he copied it for the second one.

Marriott Masters was a week-long event in May with Marriott people from all over the world coming together at one location - Orlando World Center in 1988 - to learn from each other and get to know each other. Image was the preferred vendor for meetings, parties and other MOWC functions, and there were breakfasts, lunches, dinners and evening parties every day for the whole week. We pulled out every set in the huge warehouse and spiffed up the ones we were using. We built six new cedar gazebo bars, two amoebic shaped 16' wide, 6" deep fiberglass ponds for swamp water, a big fifties diner, two Star Wars styled X-Wing fighters, and dozens of new pieces I can't even remember. My favorites, though, were the Cosmic Casino games. There was a crash landing game with rockets (darts) that crashed into planets (balloons) on a star-studded backdrop; a Solar Rings game with spacey-looking ring things to toss onto spacey-looking pegs; a Black Hole game with sections of 12" tubing and 11" balls to toss into them. I found that I really liked inventing and fabricating themed games.

One memorable occasion was the afternoon when we were busy in the shop, but not slammed, and the call came from the Marriott: the crew was falling behind! They were setting up a dinner, and they were short some table cloths and chair condoms. They needed somebody to drive a truck out with the stuff and help with the installation. Well, I had a driver's license. All fingers pointed at me. Damn! So, mumbling and grumbling a blue streak, I loaded the step van with table cloths and chair condoms and drove to the Marriott. I parked and carried the stuff in, pissed to the max. Damn it, Jim! I'm a carpenter not a decorator! But I slung tablecloths and stretched condoms for a half hour or so before the band came out to do a sound check. It was the fifth dimension! Marilyn McCoo, Billy Davis Junior and the others! One of my top 100 favorite sixties groups. They sang five songs for us, and we were digging it the most! Next thing I knew, I had forgotten to be pissed. I went home singing, and the next day bought their Greatest Hits cd.

In early august, we did a show at the Marriott that required a Disney-style castle. Caputo gave the artist at the time, Misty, the job of creating a multi-layered two-dimensional one out of Gatorfoam board. She did, and it was embarassing. It was very difficult to stand up, took a lot of time and materials to keep it standing up, it was small and dumpy. A few days later, Caputo came to the shop with a Corman And Associates catalog. He called Al Ohlson and me to the drawing table and showed us a picture of one of their Santa castles. "I want one of these," he said, "but I want it bigger, like twenty five feet tall, forty feet wide, and, I don't know, twelve feet deep - whatevah. Bigger, you get me? Jimmy, you can run with it, I know you'll do it right. Al, you give him whatever he needs. Got it? Good." he left us a copier copy of the page, and I was off and running with the coolest project ever. All of the towers were octagonal and stacked like Legos. The walls hooked together with French cleats. The two towers on the corners of the walls just hooked over the top and locked the whole business together. No screws were required for the installation. While I engineered and built all of this stuff, Al and Bob were creating the fancy trim pieces. As I finished sections and stood them up, they fitted trim pieces to the sections. Caputo came back frequently to make sure he liked it. I made two tower "hats" shorter than the rest just for variety. "That looks dumpy!" he said. "Make those two just like the others." That was his only criticism of everything I built. And when I was done building the castle, while Al and Bob were making flags, fitting trim pieces, fiberglassing the hats, painting and glittering, Caputo told me to build crates for the pieces. I learned the fine art of crate building when I made forty nine crates for my castle. All of this went on, of course, when there were no more pressing matters to attend to. I remember building an Italian restaurant set with castle parts and crates crowding me all around. Little by little, however, crates were finished, castle parts were laid to rest in them and they were stacked off to the side. December 10th (my mother's birthday) was the maiden voyage. The crates were loaded onto the flatbed trailer and it was hauled to (you guessed it) the Marriott World Center. This was when we learned that the ceiling at the location of the tallest tower was not quite twenty four feet tall. We had to remove a ceiling tile to stack it up. After the party, we took it apart, crated it up and loaded it back onto the trailer. It was hauled back to the shop and sat on the trailer uncovered for two weeks. It rained nearly every day those two weeks. I was physically ill when I looked out at my baby neglected out in the rain.

The honeymoon was officially over.