Joan assessed the crowd, lighting upon the most interesting: young men turning white T - shirts into art, pinching the material tight and rubber - banding each section until they looked like porcupines being dipped into
huge steaming vats
of colored dyes; the young woman with a bird's nest
of purple hair sitting at a potter's wheel, slamming down hunks
of clay, her hands moving nearly as fast as the wheel, cups, vases, plates, bowls, trays, appearing like magic; the elderly man in a worn blue linen suit, a jaunty straw boater on his head, a smeared palette tight in his hand, painting a mammoth canvas
of people on a beach staring out at an ocean where a sailboat bobbed in the distance, though he himself was standing in a mowed field; the handsome young man at an old - fashioned school desk, a manual typewriter in front
of him, a
stack of paper to the side.