In the summer before I left for college, I worked at HersheyPark as a Kaman’s Art Studios caricature artist. HersheyPark, as far as I can tell, is a repository for the all the trash of America. Assholes of every race and creed streamed into the park every day, and I, poised like a grizzly fishing for salmon, caught them at the gate. I hawked and catcalled as they streamed in, trying to get someone to sit in front of my easel. My supervisor would yell at me if I didn’t yell loud enough. I also wasn’t allowed to sit down unless I was drawing somebody, so as the day wore on, that made for real incentive to acquire more victims. I was paid twenty percent of every drawing I made, and was expected to be able to whip off a black and white face in thirty seconds. The old hands, the guys who had been doing this every summer for ten, fifteen, twenty years, could actually pull this off. Their easels resembled assembly lines, and the younger artists made wide-eyed speculations by the cotton candy machine as to their income. They were the ones who got the really good shifts, the late afternoon and evening, and drove home in used cars to meet their unsatisfied wives, to whom they were as unfaithful as they could manage. I knew because they bragged about it over the soda counter.
But most of my human contact was with the people I drew, at least when it wasn’t raining. A caricature artist has various skills to master beyond the drawing; sales, entertainment. You’re expected to carry on a good conversation with your subjects while you’re mutilating them on the easel. It always felt a little two-faced; you were speaking with geniality and animation, while on the paper, you were creating grotesque impersonations of the person you were charming. And worst of all, in the end, both the charm and the mutilation was just to make a sale.
There were various sorts who would sit. There was the little boy whose domineering mother decided would love a caricature; he would be a soccer player, and would usually be too meek to care how the picture looked, although the mother could be real trouble. Better was the little boy who dominated his mother. He would also be a soccer player – albeit in more of an action pose – and he’d be too enthusiastic to care about the picture. His mother would just be happy to have found someone on whom to dump him for five minutes. Also easy was the little princess who would be, you guessed it, a princess. All you had to do was make her look good – quality didn’t matter at all – and she’d be overjoyed, and her parents would probably buy her an expensive wooden frame.
Adults were always harder, because they tended to focus more on the substance of the product rather than its novelty. There were various couples that would come and get double portraits. They were always interesting because they consistently had some of the most critical eyes. They were aware of every flaw, both in their partner and in the depiction of their partner, and were also enormously self-conscious about how their portraits compared, and how the two were related on the sheet. But despite all this, they were there to have a good time, the guy was getting something nice for the girl, they were feeling content, expansive, unconcerned, so they never complained.
There was the fat girl, who was easy, although first-timers often ran into real trouble. The key was simply to make the eyes beautiful. Similarly, a ludicrously muscled body could always convincingly offset fat hanging off the jowls of men. We caricature artists were freed from the chains of propriety, aesthetics, and taste. More than once, that fat guy would be showing off his muscles by pumping a Pamela Anderson barbell.
The problems always came from the people who didn’t actually want to sit but sat anyway. The awkward preteen girl in the group of gaggly friends, all of whom needed their pictures drawn. Especially tough was the Sunday father who went to the park on the one afternoon each week he was permitted with his child. He was a more common figure than you might think, and the drawing always meant something more to him. It was also invariably a double portrait, although it never should have been. The afternoon was already enough of a caricature for them, and while I always went easy on the exaggerations, these drawings always somehow turned out as my most grotesque.
Kaman’s Art Studios invited me back for a second year. I never returned the call.
