How this stuff works.

Making the ads for Team G has always been a lot of fun, ever since the early days of my pointing at the screen and asking HOLDEN to work his computer magic to make things look the way I envisioned them. I'm getting a little better at the whole Photoshop / Illustrator intricacies, but since I've never really read instruction manuals and don't know any technical terms, I run into problems all the time and don't know how to fix them, so I'll just scrap the project and start over again. Being that I am the most impatient of all GCI members.

I've always wanted to take team pictures in some sort of theme, and cooks just seem really funny to me. And besides that, there's the fact that my favorite picture of U2 was taken with them as chefs and Brian Eno as the Maitre'd for the Passengers album. So I asked Geva's costume goddess AMANDA to supply us with costumes, and all these chefs outfits are actually those of Five Course Love, which debuted at Geva Theatre Center and just finished a run in NYC. The props were supplied by MARK BISSONNETTE of Prop Shop fame.

BRIAN brought The Camera, his million-dollar, Hubble-Ain't-Got-(scum bib)-on-me monster truck of the photographic world, and took a bunch of pictures; picking which one to make for our next flyer was no real problem, though: just look at BRIAN - far left, with that grimace on his face. I cannot stop looking at it. Hilarious.

Again, since I'm so amatuer-ish, I couldn't get the magnetic lasso to not make life miserable for me in trying to cut the picture out after desaturating and cropping. So I spent an hour erasing the background at like, 600%. And yes, SWITHUN is that cute that close up. PAUL is not.

Here's what I did tinkering around after I finished. There's a nice, big, fat flyer in the works, one that you'll hopefully see at your local coffee shop or Tom Wahl's sometime soon for the last three show weekends of SEASON III. You should make this picture your desktop. I mean, really. LOOK at BRIAN. Cute little dumpling, that one.