The (Fabulous) Selfie Show

Last night, around 8:15, I left the party and drove home in the best of moods. The sun was setting, it was lovely and warm, I had the top down on the car and stunning choral music was playing on my radio. There were Deer everywhere getting their last mouthfuls of food before nightfall. But the best part of the drive was how good I felt after seeing so many people at the party and engaged with the self-portraits.

Bill, Tawny, Margy and Fran came by here at 1:00 as planned, and we loaded up their cars with my flowers. I got to the Community Hall at around 1:30 and immediately started strategizing how and where to hang the portraits. 

We quickly fell into an effective team with Bill focused on making millions of little balls of putty with which we attached the selfies to the wall. Fran and I did all the hanging, ensuring that we maintained a balance as we worked—we wanted an integrated look so we kept a careful balance of sophisticated versus raw portraits, portraits dense with colour versus simpler sketches and 3-D portraits versus flat images.

We did a great job.

And to keep things simple, I proposed putting our flowers on the tables and only a few on the walls. Hanging them from the ceiling was too much trouble for me to consider because it took us three hours of hard, dedicated work to get all the selfies up.

I whipped home at 5:00 to rest, eat and commune with my family of pets, and then I went back at 7:30 for a quick look at things. I did not want to stay.

Within minutes of arriving, Michelle, the Arts Council ED, came over to me and directed my attention to the stage. I was in rough shape. I could not talk; there was too much noise and too many people, so I was missing hearing the MC introducing me to the crowd and telling them the show was my idea. I got an amazing (and embarrassing) round of applause—and later a second one when the MC discovered I’d also made all the flowers.

That’s why the drive home was so lovely. I was full of pride in our show and the party and how successful it was. The selfie show was a monster hit. People were spending their time looking at each one and there were something like 240 of them to look at.

All that work was worth it.

Today I go on the big community dog walk, and I rest after a job very well done by the incredible team of volunteers of which I was a proud part.

Bill (L), the wonderful Jill, Fran's daughter who is a delight, 
and Mary. We started in the centre of the wall and worked
outwards to hand the selfies. Click to enlarge.

The selfies covered a wide strip of one long wall and one
short one. We hung them salon style. Click to enlarge.

Bill roles putty for Fran and I to use to attach the selfies
to the wall; Mary records the name of each contributor
and numbers each selfie.

This is the crowd at the party! I was thrilled to see hour endless
hard, hard work rewarded by such success.

People really engaged with the selfies. There were so many to
look at that you could easily and happily spend an hour taking
them all in.

The MC in action on the stage. There were DJs afterwards.
Below are some sample portraits of about 240 entries.

The photo does not do this portrait justice. I sponsored the
local school's entries so there were lots of children's portraits,
but this one blew me away. The artist is in grade one! And
she's a First Nations girl.