Me and Truckey on Brett's party bus sideshow

This is my rough sketch of birthday boy Brett Lars Underwood, doing a routine out of a side window of Sam Coffey's big green bus this week when a troupe of us drove and ferried up to Brett's native Calhoun County, Illinois, for a celebratory repast at the historic Wittmond's Hotel.

Here is what Brett really looked like, from Sarah Truckey's Flickr site (otherwise known as Trcky). Sarah is some kind of awesome photographer, judging from her Trcky, but unfortunately for blogging scavengers like me, she seems to know the secret for uploading your photos in a way that turns them into empty air when the public right-clicks to save and share. Oh, well. On slow blog days in the coming weeks, I'll post more of my sketches with, at least, links to Sarah's more superior photographic documents.

We were a gathering of smart, somewhat inward people, which is better or at least more fun than a gathering of inward, somewhat smart people. (Been, done.) Also, a band of discrete documentarians. In addition to Sarah's photos and my sketches, just about everybody was covertly nabbing bits of image, still or moving, on some sort of handheld device.

The most amazing thing about a delightful journey, however, was that a bar and restaurant scene remained active and open for business back in St. Louis while we were away, since just about every man who ever served me a drink or a reuben poured out of Sam Coffey's green bus when we got to the old hotel in Brussells.