IN SEARCH OF KRANE BLOOGER, ACTS 1 AND 2

Note: The artist’s name in this story, Krane Blooger, has been changed to protect the innocent and to keep my husband out of prison.

The beginning of the story is shadowy because it took place forty years ago. The people involved are getting old and their memories are not as clear as they used to be.

ACT I

The Characters: Four roommates including graduate student Tom, his fraternity brother Orell, his real brother Bob, and his friend Morrie.

The Scene: The Bison Arms Apartments near the NDSU campus in Fargo, North Dakota, sometime between 1968 and 1970. It's Orell's moving-out day.

Synopsis: Orell is packing up all his belongings and moving on to bigger and better things. However, after he is gone, one of his roommates finds a painting in the closet he just vacated.

Puzzled, the three remaining roommates closely inspect the artist’s signature, and the young men find that the painting has been done by Krane Blooger, another NDSU student and fraternity brother of Orell and Tom. It is unknown how Orell came by the painting; but since Orell had never hung it on a wall, the young men assume that the painting is not valuable and make no effort to return it to him. They believe it was just an amateur painting done in some Art 101 class, and stuck in a closet.

(Note: Actual events were not recorded in Tom’s “My Little Pony” diary. Therefore, some memories are unclear. Where that happens, I just make things up. So sue me.)

Later, when Tom moves out of the Bison Arms, he takes the painting with him. Either that, or Morrie takes the painting with him. (Sigh) Well, one of them takes the painting because they can’t just leave it in the apartment. Somehow, at that point, the painting (possession being 9/10ths of the law) is no longer in the possession of either their former roommate Orell or the artist, Krane Blooger.

ACT 2:

The Scene: Tom’s first junior high counseling office, 1972-73.

Synopsis: Tom, newly hired and earthly-belongings deficient, has only one piece of art to his name—the abandoned Krane Blooger painting taken from the closet at the Bison Arms apartment. So when he decorates his office, guess what he hangs on the wall?

He is also color blind and artistically impaired, very unsure of his own ability to judge a painting for its artistic merit. So one day when the junior high art teacher is in his office, Tom asks him what he thinks of the painting. The art teacher, trying to be tactful, tells Tom that he thinks the painting is a piece of crap. (“Primitive,” he says, carefully measuring his words in case Tom himself painted it.) Tom removes the Krane Blooger painting from his wall and takes it home, where his wife is also reluctant to hang it in a prominent place.

The Krane Blooger in a basement utility room, right next to an ironing board.

(Stay tuned for Acts 3 and 4 of "In Search of Krane Blooger" in future blogs entries at this site.)