FedEx Fiascos, Rain Delays, & Drawing a Hundred New Yorkers' Dogs in the West Village
Raising money for Rain Or Shine Rescue in NYC by scribbling your pups
If you want to know how my Saturday started, I can summarise it in a single, deeply aggravating sentence…
I arrived at FedEx at 9:30AM to pick up our event signage, only to find the doors locked, the lights off, and not a single soul inside. There is a very particular type of panic that sets in when you are scheduled to host a live event in Manhattan in less than an hour, and your entire visual display is trapped behind corporate glass. After a frantic scramble and some aggressive tapping on my phone, I managed to pay a bike messenger to go back at 10am and race the signage down the West Side Highway. It arrived with mere minutes to spare. Because the show, as they say, must go on.
Scott and I spent the day posted up at the front of Framebridge in the West Village, armed with a stack of our new books, You’re Not a Real Dog Owner Until..., and a mountain of Blackwing pencils. We weren’t just there to hawk books, though. We were there raising money for Rain or Shine Rescue, an incredible organisation that helps foster dogs and find them forever homes.
Our job for the day? Signing the books and sketching people’s dogs directly onto the title pages, live and on the spot, using the lock-screens and camera rolls of the people standing in front of us.
Despite the morning logistical nightmare, it was pretty fantastic. We had a non-stop line the entire day. People brought their own rescue pups to the table, neighbourhood regulars stopped by, and we spent hours doing our absolute favourite thing in the world: drawing dogs and talking to the people who are also obsessed with them.
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When you spend an entire day drawing New Yorkers’ dogs from their owners’ phones, you start to notice a few undeniable truths:
The 8,000 Photo Disclaimer: No dog owner will ever just show you one photo of their dog. They will scroll through an album of 8,000 nearly identical photos, furiously apologising because “he’s usually way cuter than this, wait, let me find the one of him in the little sweater from last Tuesday...”
The Convergence Theory is Real: It is a cliché, but it is true: New Yorkers eventually morph into their dogs. I drew a Wirehaired Pointing Griffon for a guy in a tweed blazer, and I swear to God they both looked like they taught philosophy at NYU.
The Neurotic Stare: Every single rescue dog in Manhattan has a very unique look in its eyes. It’s a mix of deep, soulful gratitude and the vibrating, existential anxiety of a creature that has to trot past a screeching garbage truck every morning to pee. They are the perfect muses.
Of course, because it’s New York in the spring, the sky eventually decided to open up. We got rained out, frantically grabbed our easels and books, and shuffled the entire operation inside the Framebridge store. Twenty minutes later, the sun came back out, and we dragged the whole circus right back onto the sidewalk.
It was chaotic, it was exhausting, and it was the most fun we’ve had in months. We are absolutely going to do it again soon.
But here is the best part: if you couldn’t make it to the West Village to stand in line while it rained, you don’t have to miss out. We are still doing custom dog sketches directly into the pages of the book. You can order one right now, and we will draw your weird, beautiful, neurotic dog and ship it straight to your door.
WANT TO GET YOUR DOG DRAWN IN THE BOOK?
A huge thank you to everyone who came out to Bank Street, braved the weather, and helped us raise money for Rain or Shine Rescue. If you’d like to donate to them, you can do so here.
‘til next time!
Your pal,
PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.
