Rambling about jobs

In high school, I was a serial job hopper. I got my first job at age 15 - I was a carhop at Sonic. From there, I mostly switched jobs every few months. They got boring fast, and it was always easy to find another one that paid as well or better. Frequently, I would work two or three different jobs at a time to get around the child labor laws. But I still never had any money. I'm not sure why exactly, and I bet my parents then would have never expected me to turn out to be an accountant. I worked at several Sonics, Barnes & Noble, B. Dalton, a coffee shop at Collin Creek Mall, and CiCi's Pizza among others.

But the weirdest job I had was one that I found on the internet one year. I was an assistant to an artist. Her name was Donna, and she was a middle-aged woman who made soft-sculpture dragons. The dragons were kind of neat, and she took them very seriously. She was constantly lecturing me about how the dragons had souls, and would choose people to live with. She couldn't let them go home with just anybody, so she priced them accordingly and sold very few.

She had a crush on Al Gore because he had "honest eyes and a dragon soul" (they were running rampant, those dragon souls). Every day, we would watch Opera together while I sewed and stuffed legs and cut spiked ridges out of leather. She would sew all the parts together, and then make a ceremony of adding the eyes as the last step. If someone she didn't like came on the television, she would use a smudge stick to rid the room of the bad energy. Her workroom always smelled like burnt sage.

She had a kind of amalgamation of new age ideas and spirituality practices. I frequently distressed her by bringing in bad energy that I must have picked up at swim practice, or maybe the mall. She was always arranging crystals on my work table, or waving smudge sticks at me, or working on my chakras.

In the spring of that year, she bought a booth at the Scarborough Renaissance Festival. I was the salesperson, and we stayed all weekend long every week. I started out wearing a beautiful hand made gown of wine-colored panne velvet, with an ivory and gold brocade bodice. It only took about one day of the Texas heat before I went and bought myself a blue and white cotton 'wench' costume with a short skirt and short sleeves. At Donna's insistence, I faked a (very unconvincing) British accent and explained to potential customers that they couldn't choose a dragon; the dragon had to choose them. Our booth was right across from the Mud Show, and by the end of the first weekend, I had developed an intense hatred of the act, which I could recite from memory (I can still hear it in my head - Beowulf: IN! THE! MUD!). At night, the booth was swelteringly hot and I would stay up until the early morning reading a book by flashlight and munching on ice from a cooler.

That job didn't pay as well as some (I made mad money as a roller skating carhop), but it made for some kooky stories.