A Shore Tradition

Earlier this week, one of my co-workers mentioned that he had won a radio contest, allowing him to invite a large group of people for a special happy hour at a local bar/club. He offered to put me on the list to get in. I agreed, although I had my doubts about going, since every weather forecast in the land said to expect significant snow to fall well into the workday today, and I had no intentions of driving around on bad roads freezing up as the sun went down. We did get some rain overnight, but by the time I got up today even that was gone, leaving sunny skies and dry roads.

So in the afternoon I went up to the Studio to continue my ongoing process of coloring some older projects. Shortly after 5 pm I put everything away and took the short drive to the Headliner, its huge parking lots almost already full. Got my fill of free ziti, sausage and peppers, buffalo chicken nuggets, etc, and dollar bottles of Yeungling. The happy hour room where we were was packed (Tony's group was one of several such parties), easily a few hundred people, making most conversations impossible. Luckily I had something else to do as well.

Another item on my original list for the Floating World series is a typical boardwalk bar/night club. My thinking was something in the nature of the Tiki Bar at Point Pleasant, but I could see incorporating aspects of other area places. Complicating things is the long shadow cast by that MTV Jersey Shore show, whose cast members apparently spend a lot of time in clubs in Seaside Heights. They are not a direct influence (the show debuted in December 2009, while I started this series in August 2008 and had started planning it the summer before) on this piece, but a few characters of that type were always planned to be in the crowd. The print is not likely to be started too soon, but tonight seemed like a good opportunity to do a little research, so I brought camera and paper and pencil with me. Mostly I was interested in architecture (like the television rack shown above) and bar equipment/layout. I did take a few crowd photos (though with everyone in winter clothes I don't know how helpful they will be) and did a bunch of gestural sketches of people, all to be filed away for the future.