Hat Trick

Sat 10 May 200301:44 AM

My girlfriend is due back from her ~3-month backpacking tour of Asia tomorrow evening. She was away for her birthday on 25 Apr, and in spite of the extra few weeks of present-shopping time, I still hadn’t bought anything for her until this afternoon. At Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street, I passed this kid with a card-table full of cheap baseball caps. He was customizing them in a graffiti style with paint pens, charging customers on a kind of sliding scale of decorative typography: simple tags for five dollars, block letters for ten, and shading and filling for fifteen.So I said why not, and asked him to design one with the name “Joy.” He seemed a little dispassionate about his work, and I find the aesthetic quality of his tagging skills to be actually rather tame, but I’m actually kind of happy with the result. If nothing else, it’s one of a kind, and almost certainly nothing she could have bought for herself in Asia.

+