By Bobbi Eggers
Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous. Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Standing on the sidelines of your kids’ soccer game, do you ever hear another parent say something hilarious, but she doesn’t know how crazy it sounds? (“We may have lost the game but we served better snacks.”) Maybe you were at lunch with some friends and another mom was complaining about her kid for the hundredth time? (“I have a kid I’d like to re-gift.) I think everyone who grows their own vegetables thinks (but won’t admit out loud), “I figure after buying the plants, fertilizer, topsoil, deer fencing, plus hours of weeding, each tomato cost me $500.”) Standing in conversation this week, one of my friends was telling us she just auctioned off her ex-husband’s wine collection. She looked at me with a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin and said, “Liquid assets.” Bingo. One day that will become a cartoon. That is exactly how it works.
Lightening strikes. I remember the minute my Greenwich cartoon collaboration with stand-up comedian Jane Condon began. It was the beginning of a love story for me that would last nearly 20 years. My friend, Lin Lavery, the woman who knows everyone in town, took me to one of Jane Condon’s performances in Greenwich. She had seen Jane perform and said, “She’s hilarious. You’re going to love her, I promise.” As Jane bounded up onto the stage, she opened her LL Bean canvas tote bag and pulled out a headband, a long flannel nightgown and laughed about Greenwich grocery store shoppers wearing their mandatory pearls. She told us about the first time she came to Greenwich and saw the highway sign, “Welcome to Greenwich. Please Dress Nice.” The audience howled and it fanned her flame. She captured our quirky Greenwich lives and held up a mirror for us to enjoy. (“Same sex marriage? What’s the problem? My husband and I have been having the same sex for years.”) I felt as if I knew every person she was talking about. As an Art Director in advertising, I had years of drawing TV storyboards and I knew I could just as easily whip up cartoons. After the applause, I bravely asked Lin to introduce us. “I know exactly who you’re talking about,” as I heartily shook Jane’s hand. “I want to put pictures to your jokes.”
And so it began.
The kitchen table became the appropriate heartbeat for our cartoons. Jane and I have spent many years evolving with the times, lovingly laughing about our kids, other people’s kids, Chardonnay moms, Pinot Grigio playdates, paparazzi parents, vacations, and everything in between. She lines up her cans of Diet Cokes and I stare at her refrigerator completely covered with family photos. We keep a running list of ideas. People approach us at the grocery store or at cocktail parties with their suggestions for cartoons. The most enthusiastic ones come from the men, “Please, not another fundraiser.” (Who’s husband hasn’t said that?) I think the cartoon that gets played back the most is, “Ever notice the bigger the house, the less the wife weighs?”
Jane and I trust each other, and that is the most important part of any partnership, allowing the creative process to flow without judgment. We don’t disrespect our friends, ever. One of the highest compliments we have had was a friend who said, “I feel like you are laughing with us, not at us,” and it is true. Once we refine our ideas the drawings just pour out of me, like channeling my pals. I have evolved from drawing with Flair pens to drawing on my iPad Pro, which is a huge creative breakthrough for me. It’s truly magic the way it can create watercolors or pencil, markers or finished oil paintings.
After the whirling dervish of our work sessions together, I have to take time to think about all of it. Running outside or lying in bed with my first thoughts in the morning seem to be the most creative venues. This is the importance of unpressured, unstructured play for children. It is the moment when the subconscious and consciousness collide. Suddenly I see it, like a photograph. I know exactly what it looks like and feels like and it will buzz around in my head until I can get it out.
Jane and I have created Greenwich cartoons for newspapers, calendars, paper goods and a book of our greatest hits, “Chardonnay Moms.” It has truly been a labor of love and a privilege to work with Jane, a winner of “Last Comic Standing and “Ladies of Laughter.” She‘s always on the road, mentoring other comedians, making people laugh, and I capture some of those moments and scribble them into cartoons. So if you have a yearning to be creative, be brave, be thoughtful, and make time for unstructured play. But if all else fails, try Chardonnay.
Please visit Jane and Bobbi at chardonnaymoms.com
