"Spray paint, everybody. No rules!"

I'm sure that anyone who has read Pilar's post knows that I was volunteering with the Read-Seed event. I was there to support whatever needed to be done, which led me to flex both real and creative muscle (what little there is in both departments).

When I arrived, Jenni Davidson and her two Sophomore-Experience volunteers had just started setting up, so I helped them carry out tents and tables. Once that was done, we started assembling our Pagoda of Philanthropy. I didn't tell anyone that was the name I had given our tent-and-tables set up...mostly because I knew I was the only one who thought it was cool.

As we were finishing up with the tent (or pagoda, whichever floats your boat), Pilar arrived with an arm-load of supplies from Adelaide's car. She asked me to help her unload the car, but when I turned around, Adelaide was driving her car up the sidewalk. Suffice it to say, that made unloading a bit easier, though we were all keeping our eyes out for campus police.

Adelaide's effervescent personality helped all of us hit the ground running. As Pilar already posted, we were drawing cartoon figures and creating yellow, cardboard bricks. Once I finished helping getting everything set up, I started working on my rendition of Thing 1 from The Cat in the Hat. I spent the majority of the time working on this ersatz-Thing 1, and even had to get some last minute help from Pilar to get the hair colored in time.

Pilar, on the other hand, was all over the place. Everytime I looked up, she was doing something different, from taking pictures, to signing in volunteers, to offering encouragement to the those of us who qualified as less artistic, and even working on Adelaide's Yellow Brick Road, which she had to cover herself in a transparent, yellow poncho to start painting. I think Adelaide has a thing for the color yellow.

Evidently, things are much wilder in the Smith Warehouse where Pilar works, along with Neil Hoefs, the Vista* that organized this event, as well as the event taking place at the Duke Community Gardens. I learned this when Pilar, who was getting ready to begin painting the bricks, picked up two cans of spray paint and shouts out, "Spray paint, everybody. No rules," and then begins to laugh to herself. Evidently, the "No rules!" thing is something Neil often does. The "Wildness" theory was corroborated when Neil came over to our site after the events wrapped up; he and Pilar greeted each other with a secret handshake. It was awesome. No really, you should have seen it; it was perfectly timed and everything.

The event went very well, we even recruited some volunteers right off the sidewalk. On top of that, several of the volunteers committed themselves to volunteering at Reed-Seed's Read-A-Thon in early November. In addition, we were able to create several new cartoon figures for Adelaide and her event. It was a really fun experience, and now I find myself saying "No rules" as well.