open on scene
art ctr
kids in hiding/voyeurs

costumed artist / climbs

The clanking noise of tin against steel echoes furtively between the four-story art center and the tiny chapel forty feet away. Both buildings rise up from the top of a gentle slope that slide nicely down to the meandering Ivy River where often can be found coeds sitting in the thickets, lying, in pairs, among the bushes and walking among the evergreens in warm seasons.

Just now, however, we are close to Christmas.
A hollow sound hangs in the foggy winter air. It is dampened by the softly dusting snowfall. Snow that is adding to that which is collected on the drooly crust along the banks of the quick river running through north campus.

In this particular chill, with erratic low temp spikes of early winter, the snow softens the din of a huffing. It is a puffing evidence that someone is climbing up the steel fire-ladder that spans the wall from the basement to the roof of the art building.
Tall pines rise in the fog and a swirl of fluffy snow conceals the climber to a point just this side of absolute invisibility.
Said vision of climbery would be completely dark but for the blue and red lights that intermittently bounce off the icicles, the glistening snow flurries as well as the dull sheen of a hand-made full metal jacket that sheaths her torso.
The sound of her breath counter-signs her existence; evidence of human aurality, moving higher in space in tandem with the clicking and the clacking of the tinny aluminum suit that encloses her.

This climbing racket, deliberate, in cadence with her breath, is composed of a mixture of sounds: soft girlish grunts and odd lip-smacking noises involved with the effort of vigorous upward movement. All these are heard along with a case of stress-related hiccups punctuating counterpuntally with the already syncopated thin metal clashes caused by her movements. These are noises forming an odd and intricately varied human sonata in the night.
What we have found here, you see, is a painter convinced in her upward climb that she is completely hidden from all eyes. Reality, however, is very much to the contrary, her unshakeable convictions in the matter completely not-with-standing.
***Two young men watch her clumsy ascent from their hidden perch in the blind that they have thatched deep in the yews and pines that cover them, they are backed up against the school’s chapel. Tucked back against the chapel’s west wall located some thirty feet away from Kinsel Art Center’s nearest opposing wall they are better hidden than she by far. Cozy amid the thick bank of yews on this gentle hill sloping down to the bike path that runs parallel to the river they are just two of the several generations of college kids had dubbed the close by stream The River Stickie.


Jack: “What’s that thing she has on?”

Warren: “I dunno. Looks like a bunch of cans wired together.” Warren pushes his wool watch-cap up out of his eyes.

Jack (his tongue clicks the habitual “tsk” sound that often preceded his remarks):
“Tsk. You don’t think she’s got herself wired to something, do you?”

Warren leans over and pulls a few of the burlap bags they had squirreled across the river from the greenhouses left over from summer horticulture classes and bunches them behind his back like pillows between he and the brick wall they lean on.

Warren: “Like what? Like some tele-communications device? Maybe some kind of aerial or antenna?”

He takes his wool hat off and reaches into matted hair to scratch an itch caused by sweat rivulets.

Warren (thinking twice, now with a growing sense of minor alarm):“Er, you don't mean a bomb or something."

He scratches his head now in frustration in addition to the itches of a sweaty scalp.

Warren: "What. Are you nuts? She hasn’t gone THAT far ‘round the bend, Jack, not very damn likely. Good God, I can’t believe you." (more softly) "Or her either, for that matter.”

Jack: “Yeah? Well, I wouldn’t put anything past her, I tell you, not one single thing.” Jack pokes Warren with his elbow for emphasis.

Warren: “Shhh. Dammit! She’ll hear us.

***


The blue and red lights bouncing off her tin and aluminum jacket are reflections from the spinning red and blue lights on top of the three university police cars parked in the circle across from the chapel next to the Kinsel Art Center. Two pairs of campus police wait while a third have gone inside to conduct a search of the basement labs where research animals are housed and used for psych department studies.

Cop dialogue One
Third Break in within the month at the animal research labs…two CJ student riders along for the investigation … CJ students: Mark Chitters &
Dennis “Doobie”Yates

Cop dialogue Two


Dog Ziggity, Glory’s black lab, was meanwhile just getting off the freight

elevator to take up his post outside her studio until she entered it from the roof. She had sent him up on the freight elevator near where her parking spot was out behind the sculpture studio behind the main building.