Mud Life Crisis

If you’re reading this, you probably have my postcard (taken by Jan Oswald) stuck to your fridge…If you don’t have that picture (you can see it at the right of my wiki-pedia page), but wish you did, just pop a fiver (euros, dollars, moon units) in an envelope, throw in a couple of stamps, AND your address.
Send to Mudwoman, Box 757 Fairfax CA 94978

My prize winning Rock Shox “Mud Life Crisis” card will wend its way to you (and your fridge)
Allow a month to reach the U.K.
Got a brushed stainless steel refridgerator? Magnets don’t work on ’em!
If you have this kind of fridge, please send TEN dollars. I’ll include Technology Guaranteed To Keep Card On Fridge.

This card’s primary job is to look cool, but its secondary job is to encourage you to:
a) eat more chocolate
b) play in the mud
c) ride more often this winter
This card is a CLASSIC. But at fifteen years old, it’s also ancient!
Bikers are novelty nuts, right?
A fifty two year old racer is not new.
It’s time for a MUD MAKEOVER.
Don’t you want to see the new me?
(Hint: SAY YES!)
(If you said NO, please step around back, we’ll discuss this after I’m through being crass.)
This is to be part of a photographic series shot once every fifteen years.
Unlike the growing Wonderbread Kid, mine will show the inevitable sliding back into the ooze…
May I suggest that this may not be as bad as the alternative?
I tapped Anne Cutler to tackle the job.
She readily agreed.
(Next morning)
It is a fine day, and we head out to a Body Of Water Which Shall Remain Nameless to smear some nice gooey real mud all over, and see if much has changed since that December morning in 1991 when I spent three hours at Oswald’s Denver warehouse studio patting myself down with gritty commercial soil (wetted down, reeking of steer manure), arranging feathers in my hair, and allowing Ming, the photo assistant, to squirt me periodically with water to keep up the shine. I recall the studio didn’t have much heat.

Oh, yeah… don’t forget a squirt bottle.
Bucket. Trowel.
Face cloth.
Tea thermos.
Shortbread (Mrs. Dean’s, smuggled into USA from Rothimurchus Forest Centre, in Scotland)
Why in the world should I spend another minute shivering for art’s sake?
Well, that first one was an advertisement. This time the only product around will be…terra firma. Well, maybe terra slurra.
We got straight to work, and even found a cool piece of driftwood to use as a focal point.
On the lake–sorry, on the body of water–that same hundred birds from a few blogs ago flapped and called “keeerrrr-keeer-keeeer!”…
The sun threw tiny diamonds on the surface while tiny fish darted below.
A certain someone had fun reapplying mud.
Anne clicked away, two cameras, three lenses. Her jeans got muddy knees.
Once we’d gotten seventy shots or so, it was time.
Tea and cookies and warm earth. Overhead a few clouds had begun to form.
When we came down the hill into town, fog was fingering White’s Hill and by the time we were at her house it was cold and dark, mid-afternoon. We had caught the Fillet of Day.

If the pix come out, we’ll do a calendar. There will be only a hundred made, and of course since they have to be ready by Christmas, we have a little work ahead of us.
Stay tuned.