As you can probably imagine, the 'Picture Me, Loving You' project has had it's interesting moments, to say the least… not the least of which was walking through Market Square with 4 people dressed up in costumes. The shenanigans continued when went into Scruffy City Hall for pictures of the characters dancing on the dance floor. Now, the owners of said establishment and the band that was playing knew we were coming… but none of the patrons did. Yep, that happened.
Unbeknownst to us, the night we chose to do this photoshoot was the same night that many other goings-on were happening in Market Square, namely, Movies on Market Square. Now, if you're not familiar with Movies on Market Square, the event goes something like this… all sorts of people bring their lawnchairs and sit in the square and watch a free movie that is projected up on a big screen on their stage. It's generally a classic film of some sort, but the point is, there are tons of people there, and parking can be a problem, so you generally have to park further away then you'd like. An important thing to note about these costumes is the fact that they're not the easiest thing to see out of. Couple that with the fact that it was a night, and the people in the costumes were basically blind. So here we go, walking through downtown Knoxville, me leading 4 people dressed in costumes across crosswalks and through hundreds of people; several of whom wanted selfies with the furry critters. Entertaining to say the least.
Once inside Scruffy City Hall, my friend Paul Noe's band, The Vibraslaps, were playing and no one really seemed to notice that there were people dressed up like horses dancing on the dance floor. Go figure We got our shot and when it was all over, the characters all took their heads off to cool off (turns out it's really hot to dance with all that fur and foam on!). A group of girls who had been watching the whole thing apparently thought it was really cool that 3 of the 4 characters were actually girls… so we posed a shot with everyone together. Never a dull moment when you're hanging out with Chris!
Special thanks to the owners of Scruffy City Hall for letting us crash the place, to Bill Foster for setting the whole thing up, and to the Vibraslaps… though, I'm not sure they saw us. 🙂 Seriously guys, thanks for entertaining us.
–Dan Thompson