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When life hands you lemons, paint a mural.

It's 3:00 in the morning and I started to tell the story of how this mural came to be, but I got tired, so I'm just going to show you a bunch of pictures of how great the process of creating it was, and tell you who made it happen. Because a lot of people worked to make this happen, and it's way up there on the list of things that I'm the most proud to have been part of.



                         

Basically, there was this ugly wall behind my bar...





...and Jasmin Garcia had this great idea...




...and a bunch of us really liked the idea ...



...including my therapist, who said that she and her partner would buy some paint for us, because none of us really have any money...



...and a bunch of us had had kind of a challenging year, so throwing paint at a wall for a few hours sounded like the best thing ever...



...and it looked really cool when it was done...




...except it wasn't done...



...we had to wait until dark to outline the letters...



...and we had to leave it like this for a while. People were really polite...like,"oh...yeah...that's...um...nice?"



...and it was nice, even if they didn't really get what was going on and thought Jasmin was just DJing in the alley...



It was so hot on this day. Gross hot.



...but it started to come together...





...and we had to work in the dark again...






...and we painted until 2 am and Shiho climbed all of the ladders and would still be painting right now if we wouldn't have stopped her...



We ended up having to sleep, but we wanted to have the majority of it finished by August First Friday. We are incredibly excited about what we've done so far, and we hope that you'll come by and see our work in progress, because we're completely in love with it! 

These are all of the awesome people who made this happen:

Jasmin Garcia - concept, design and direction
Main Street Liquors gave us the use of their wall
Officer Ryan Winkle facilitated the "can we please paint your wall" conversation
Lisa Schwab and her business partner bought the paint for us
The City of Peoria, Illinois gave us the permits we needed
Shannon Techie helped us figure out what we needed to get those permits
Schuyler Monet gave us great advice and direction
Maris Mednis and Marcus Fogliano took photos while we crawled around on rooftops
Nick Viera gave us desperately needed technical support
Shiho Amano, Laura Cordell, ChelseaAnna Gilmer, Jessica McGhee, Jasmin Garcia, Morgan Mullen, and various neighbors who stopped by while we worked all contributed to painting the mural

And I probably forgot someone because it's 4 am and I'm a forgetful person. Please know it's not a slight. I'm just sleepy. And I'm coated in paint.