1976 Mercury Comet - Cloth Covered and Painted in 1987

In 1987, I was living in Chicago with a beautiful, talented actress named Kelly Butler. We were both working intensely in our various cultural interests in the city and basically starving. Kelly and I pooled all our money together and bought this lousy, rust eaten 1976 Mercury Comet for $550. It was a lime green deathtrap on wheels. But we liked it. To cover the rust holes I decided to use old bed sheets. Using contact cement, we covered the whole thing with bed sheets that we bought at thrift stores. Then we painted it blue. Then we took a road trip to Colorado. We were pulled over by a trooper in South Dakota who just wanted to see the car up close. In the spring of 1988 we drove the car to Lansing, Michigan as part of the "Ninja Love Trilogy World Tour '88". We performed my play THE NINJA LOVE TRILOGY at Michigan State University. David Franks, another actor in the show, rode with us.  On the way back, the left rear wheel, the one you can see in the photo above, fell off on the Interstate highway. Fortunately, I was able to pull off without crashing. The wheel rolled a few hundred feet ahead and leaned against the guardrail. After a tow and replaced rear end, we were on our way back to Chicago. The car never really recovered and eventually in the fall of 1988 we drove it to a junk yard and sold it for fifty bucks.

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