Madison met Anna early in the morning at the North Beach Photo Fair in Washington Square Park. Lance did not know what to do with either of them, but they were customers of the camera shop and both stepped forward and volunteered to help, so he told them to pull pins from last year’s exhibit boards.
“How come there are pins in these in the first place?” Anna asked.
“Because we didn’t have any volunteers to remove them last year, that’s why,” Lance shouted over the din of his ghetto blaster. However, today there were plenty of volunteers and while two other people hammered the old display frames together, Lance stapled jesso-white pieces of pre-cut canvas covered boards inside each frame. The finished product was a series of exhibit racks stuck full of pins. The pins had to go.
“Madison, I need you to clean these up too, okay?” Lance demanded and asked in the same breath. Obviously, he was under considerable strain to complete his display before the crowds arrived. But he took just enough time to introduce his new helpers to each other.
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“This is Anna. Anna, Madison; Madison, Anna. I forget everyone’s last name. That’s John and that’s Warren over there,” he pointed at a large Asian man and a skinny white guy who barely looked up from their tasks, nodded, went back to work. “Help each other, willya?”
Lance placed another white-washed wall in a frame, bent a wire tab in each corner to hold it in place, shot it in all corners with a stapler where the material overlapped, then stepped back to survey his work.
