[For your amusement, a short factual story instead of the typical blogular account of my stay aboard the haunted Queen Mary. You will need about 20 minutes to read the whole thing. If you have a short attention span, little time left on your lunch break, or prefer to spoil the mood by skipping to only the "meaty bits", you can scroll down to Tales From The Ghost Ship and read from there.]



For those of you who may not already know, for 15 years now hundreds of 'net Goths from around the globe have been gathering annually under the banner of alt.gothic Convergence to meet each other face-to-face and generally share a few laughs. Though the convention predominantly takes place in the USA, each year brings a different host city with new adventures and new faces. The venue for 2009's event was the legendary RMS Queen Mary, one of the rapidly dwindling survivors from the golden age of decadent ocean liners, now permenently moored and converted into a full-service hotel in Long Beach, California. This was my 4th Convergence and I travelled with my fiancé Michael and two of our friends, staying on the Queen Mary excusively for 4 nights (July 16-20th).


RMS Queen Mary - A Living Legend

There are many things this great ship is famous for, but possibly the most fascinating is its reputation for paranormal activity. From her maiden voyage in 1936 to her retirement from active service in 1967, among many diverse travellers the Queen Mary has ferried Hollywood legends, royalty and political dignitaries, soldiers during and after the second world war, the nouveau-riche, and close to a hundred adventure seeking stowaways across the Atlantic and to other destinations. Since that time hundreds of stories have emerged about strange noises echoing down her many long, bowed passageways, spectral figures glimpsed dancing in the luxurious Grand Salon, and ghostly wet footprints appearing next to the now derelict indoor swimming pool from travellers long since passed on. There are many more such unusual stories, and your author is about to add one more.

( Things That Go Bump In The Night... )

Today my mom forwarded my aunt's email regarding her visit with my cousins:

Hi,
We had a great weekend with Dave, Gina and girls.

But....this is so weird! On our way there Saturday, we drove the scenic route that follows the shoreline up the island coast. We stopped at an Open House in Union Bay....just to be lookie-loos....nicely finished log cabin, right on the beach (quite beautiful, one bedroom with loft, and full suite in the basement, way too much $$). Anyway, the agent showed us through. I went into the master bedroom, had a peak at the ensuite, and when I turned around, on the wall was one of Elaine's original paintings, "The Model". Wow, imagine that! The agent said the owner had bought it some time ago at an Original Art Show.

The "original art show" was a group show at Spirals cabaret in North Vancouver back in May of 1993. The buyer was the CEO of C.M. Oliver & Co. Ltd. (huge stockbroker company) who bought three paintings that day (I remember this sale well because I dropped the pieces off at his posh downtown office, and the first thing I saw when the elevator doors opened was two enormous floor-to-ceiling Shadbolts). But my aunt's story is but the second bizarre incident involving the three paintings. One of them, Contemplation, was noticed on a living room wall by Michael while having Christmas dinner in his girlfriend's uncle's house back in 1996 - at least two whole years before we'd even met. Being a painter himself he remembered it, and boy did he ever have a déjà vu moment when he saw my portfolio for the first time when we began dating in 2002...

As an even weirder side note, but not involving art: in 1990 (WAY before Michael and I met), after his car broke down only a few hours drive from Vancouver while on his road trip from Duncan (Vancouver Island) to York University in Toronto, he had no choice but to stay with the only Vancouver friends he had at the time. He resigned himself to attending a local university (SFU) instead and traded the car for a month's rent in the basement of this house, which turned out to be the exact same house my father grew up in - and the basement was the room my father and his older brother shared.

Is there no such thing as destiny? I ask you to reconsider...
O_o


Anyhow, back on topic more or less. I've sold more work in cafés, bars and gourmet chocolatiers' shops than I ever have through gallery shows. Maybe it's just the style of work that I do that lends itself better to cabarets and the like, but regardless it's a statistic worth noting.