I’ve always held an abiding love for graffiti, street-art, and all of the forms of outsider art that exist in the realms of public human existence. At times, graffiti can be annoying, ugly, and crass, but there’s no denying that the autobiography of human-kind has been written/etched/spray-painted across the face of the earth since…well…since primates fell out of trees, lost their tails, and gifted their offspring with prehensile thumbs, non-prehensile toes, and great big, wrinkly brains crammed into little-bitty not-so-wrinkly heads. (And a diet of fish might have something to do with it too, but that’s a digression of a different sort, fit for a different post involving…well…icthyocentric diets.) Because spraypaint cannot be sold in Chicago, graffiti has evolved, and like any good organism, meta-organism, thingie, its evolution takes full advantage of whatever materials are left lying around. In the case of Chicago “graffiti” such materials are…well…postage labels, labels of any sort, wallpaper, and anything that’s sticky on one side and flat on the other. I wouldn’t be surprised to find “posti-it-graffiti” stuck to various surfaces using peanut butter, bubblegum, or Aunt Ruth-Mabel’s leftover cooking grease as an adhesive agent. My interest in graffiti is what led to my discovery of Walrus Cobbler, an artist who has quite a following, if one is to trust Google and Flickr. Of course, my interest in graffiti only led to my belated discovery of Walrus Cobbler last month! Others have discovered him long before me, and now he’s (she’s) all over Flickr and other such sites. I took this photograph last week—on the way home from work—while searching for things to photograph. It was a warm day and I was sure that something cute and shirtless might have been making its way to or from Oak Street Beach, but I was too lazy to walk the extra 4 blocks east. I settled on walking a couple of extra streets south…and that’s when I saw a fetching lady in hair rollers and a blue dress. Her smile and earlobes looked vaguely familiar, and I wondered if she was drawn in one of those UK-English accents that makes many Midwestern Americans start going on about how exotic England, Great Britain, Britain, and London are. Yes…you see…in the vast stretches of Midwestern USA, and Alaska…England, Great Britain, Britain and London are 13 different countries, spanning at least 40 different continents. (Oh, and did I mention that we see things differently in the Midwestern USA?) Anyway, when I saw this fetching lady (with headgear) I thought of various Andrea-doodles I’ve seen and enjoyed. …and so we come to the crux of this post. I liked what I saw and I photographed it. I thought of Andrea when I saw it, and…well…I smiled. The post-it-graffiti lady was placed upon the face of a ONE WAY sign, which also made me think that the person who put it there was rather tall, or perhaps not-so-tall, but in possession of a rather impressive, incongruously-portable ladder. And then I thought that Andrea has an incongruously-portable ladder that went missing on the day/night that this Chagall-like lady (with hair rollers) found her way onto a ONE WAY sign outside of an over-priced convenience store beneath a condo stack-travel agency-hair salon-laundromat-with-room-for-a-pony-sort-of-place. This isn’t an Andrea-doodle; it’s rather far from that particular sort of artistic brilliance, and yet, there’s a common artistic vibe. Okay, and it’s next to an anamorphic Chicago-style hotdog, waving and brandishing a pickle-weapon, and I couldn’t resist photographing a faux-Andrea doodle next to a sentient, pickle-wielding hot dog. Just as I couldn’t resist photographing it, I couldn’t resist sharing it…and so…here it is…a post-it-graffiti doodle lady…and a questionably-edible.friend. I hope you like it. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.