Before I break into some self defensive confession I must first say I’m delighted by my Baby New Year’s (aka Donald Trump) losing his head. Renee Passal from WDIO joined the Trib’s Brady Slater in giving giving my front yard and its headless snow sculpture some attention and since I’m no shrinking violet I didn’t mind the attention one bit.
Best of all, I was given a very sympathetic treatment by FOX News’s Nikki Davidson. She popped by with a sprained ankle and gamely clambered around my dangerously slippery, snow covered slope with camera and tripod in hand.
I chatted her up as I sawed Baby New Year’s head into manageable pieces and she took plenty of footage to edit down into a story for her station’s 9 PM News broadcast. Its a nice little story and I was charmed by News Anchor Dan Hanger’s banter with Nikki after the segment aired. Here’s the clip:
Admission to follow:
…..BUT…….shortly before the broadcast I was beginning to have second thoughts about the “vandalism” Baby New Years had suffered. At first I had no doubt that a brazen daylight attack had taken place. I’ve been making snow sculptures for 31 years and have been very concerned about having them fall on some poor innocent gawker since a chat I had with Jim Heffernon a quarter century ago.
Jim asked me if I was worried that a similar tragedy to the one at UMD’s old campus might take place with my massive sculptures. I had no idea what he was talking about. Apparently in the fifties or sixties a college snow day sculpture collapsed and killed the daughter of one of the faculty members. I had already imagined my own sculptures rolling down the hillside but that tale sharpened my focus considerably. I would be responsible for any damage an “attractive Nuisance” might cause.
Since then I’ve been careful to make sure things like heads were adequately supported by beefed up shoulders. As heads went the Trump head wasn’t a very big example of my work. Once fallen it was far too heavy for me to pick up in one piece but earlier Trump, Obama, Clinton and Jesse Ventura heads were all easily six or more feet tall not the measly 3 feet of this Trump bust.
Still, by Fox’s broadcast time I had misgivings about my claim of vandalism. When I went in to buy some new Windex bottles this morning at Mount Royal (to replace bottles filled with orange and yellow paint for Trump’s head) I was asked about Baby New Years and explained that my first assertion of violence was probably wrong. I explained that I thought that gravity had been my sculptures undoing. I added that I sort of thought it was an improvement and got some chuckles.
I’ve told others that Trump’s loyalists are almost as thin skinned about attacks on him as Trump is. Had the vandalism taken place at night I would have chalked it up to the Trump people even if was impossible to trace them. But during daylight hours on the busiest intersection in town? I no longer think so.
So, there you have it. I won’t be offering a lot of mea culpas for my paranoia. This is about it unless some other news outlet gives me a call. This blog is my personal, if public, confessional. I hate to wreck a good story but as a stickler for the truth I have to put the gopher back in the mountainous hole I dug for him and tamp it back down to gopher size.
