Visiting Mr. Busyfingers

Although the really good clay store near us is in Santa Ana, which is about 60 miles north, called "Aardvark", (and guess who goes there? The crazy guy from Back to the Future! Yeah! Whazzis name!), it is really frustrating to have to travel so far just for a dumb jar of butterscotch underglaze! So we found "Busyfingers Ceramics", about fifteen miles away, in a backwater of a rather rundown area. "Busyfingers" was one of those old houses converted into a shop and all of its rooms were filled with greenware. Not bisque, greenware. Shelves and shelves, stacks and stacks, ten items deep in some places. And the rooms had themes like "Halloween" or "Easter" or "Southwestern" or "really ugly animals". You could wander in there for days, keeping your arms close to your sides so as not to knock over some badly cast greenware copy of an indifferently sculpted Santa Claus. The first time I went there, I bought a really big penny jar in the shape of a sitting "Pan". For those of you not up on your Greek myths, Pan has the top half of a man and the bottom half of a goat. My Pan is crouched on his goat legs, with twining vines and leaves around him, playing his "Pan pipes", naturally. He has little curled rams horns, and is about a lascivious as a garden gnome. He was also badly cast, with great gaping seams, and he got quite a claybody job before he was painted! Yes, he's still sitting in the big barn, guarding the kiln. Make sure to say hi next time you're over.

Anyway, the Busyfingers store was run by a little old lady and a little old man. The lady was prim, clad in nylon and polyester, and had herself quite a cult following of like-minded ladies. She ran the store with an iron fist and did not tend to look beyond her own experiences and opinions. Her husband was a long-suffering fellow, a retired butcher, and if Her Highness was not in the immediate vicinity he would always offer to sell me the store. No, really. You got the feeling that he would take the check, cash it, and be in the Bahamas before Mrs. Busyfingers knew he was gone. He never said a price, and I never asked. It was understood, somehow, that a concrete price would spoil the running daydream of poor Mr. Busyfingers.

Her Highness, the Goddess of the Busyfingers empire, ran a regular schedule of classes in a tiny little room off to the side. I did sign up for one class, painting a plate with underglazes, but at the time I was trying to figure out how to paint Saucys so the plate business didn't help at all. However, I learned a list of things that "We Never Do", which included:

• We Never Sand Greenware.
• We Never Wet Greenware.
• We Never Airbrush Underglazes.

These three rules were part of the Busyfingers philosophy, honed to a fine edge by Mrs. Busyfingers' years of experience and righteousness. She really preferred if We Buy the Chosen Greenware, We Buy the Specified Underglazes, We Follow Her Patterns and Color Choices and We Do Not Make Trouble. I lasted two classes.

After that, we would drop in on the Busyfingers occasionally, when an immediate need for just a jar of something cropped up. Once, Mr. Busyfingers took us out back to see some moldy dry clay ingredients he had. We walked into the back of the house/shop, and into a patio area covered with a blue stretched tarp. In front of us were hundreds of molds, sitting outside in the weather, protected only by plastic. He lead us to the decaying bags of clay, and I vividly remember this really bizarre creature that crawled out when we moved one of the bags. It was like a skinny newt, or a snake with tiny legs, or a worm from a Celtic knot. I have never seen the like, before or since, and have lately been reading about the folklore of giant neotenous salamanders that are rumored to be found occasionally in Scandinavian countries, usually under a pile of moldering potatoes. See the connection? They apparently gave rise to the "Great Orm" myths, but that is another story.

One of the coolest molds he has was a giant elephant, or a camel, or something... think it was an elephant. It was meant to be the support for a coffee table! Another store, Connelly's, has two camels that form coffee table supports, and they are really neat.

One day, about a year ago, the Busyfingers put their store up for sale. It took a long time, but they sold everything in the store, or at least enough that the rest wasn't worth it. They are gone now, even the sign, with the greatest name a ceramic store ever had.

I miss them.

Joanie