Let me start at the beginning, the way that my favorite movie series didn't.
I was sitting with my family in one of my favorite Seattle restaurants - Anthony's on Pier 66, the upstairs hoytie-toytie reservations only bit if you know the area. I had ordered, and was eating, the grilled salmon. Excellent choice.
Seeing as how it was March of 1999, I had roughly one thing on my mind. Star Wars. See, the line for the movie was supposed to be a spectacular event that friends of mine had been planning for months, and in my own way (long before I met any of them), I had always been waiting for an opportunity to experience something uniquely tied to a movie-premiere-style event so I could hold it firmly over the heads of the younger generation. You know, just like the people who were somewhere areound College age in '77 had been doing to me all my life. For those, and a myriad of other reasons, this event was going to be big.
The subject over the course of dinner did vary slightly, but it must have changed back to Star Wars at least a dozen times. Not exculsively My Bad.
The conversation and the salmon were both very good. Suddenly, and without warning, an idea struck me from out of nowhere. They call it brain food for a reason, you know.
I told the family of my revelation. The family laughed. The family thought about it a bit. The family laughed some more. While the Family was laughing, I was rapidly ticking off things I had to do to prepare, for my scheming mind had already commited itself to the idea.
Maybe it was the fact that I'd recently had it up to my ears with friends of mine having original ideas and completely failing to do anything about anything, ever. Maybe it was the latent desire to vandalize an automobile, and me figuring the cops would be less likely to be after me if I owned it. Maybe it was because I loved my car as a brother by that point, and I knew it might feel left out if it were with me in the middle of Dork Central for two weeks with nothing silly to wear. Maybe it was something in the Salmon.
Two months later, and it had been finished.
Or so I thought.
"Finished" at the time meant "painted". Little did I know that a miniscule yet overwhelming portion of the e-mailing world would demand more of me.
I resisted for as long as I could. I thought: "Okay, a crazy paint job is one thing, but The Heck I'm going to do anything that's going to affect the gas mileage or my ability to, oh, I dunno... drive the thing."
I was also under the impression that doing anything to the exterior would land me a hefty ticket somewhere along the line.
The inside, though, was a different thing altogether. It was already thrashed before I got it, so I didn't feel bad in the slightest about pinstriping some interior panels in red vinyl. But it wasn't enough. I kept forgetting that I was driving something that was the lease bit strange. People would lurk in my blind spot in traffic, and I'd swear and swear and swear and swear before I remembered they were probably just rubbernecking in a potentially lethal freeway-speed kind of way. Fine... this problem has been alleviated via small adjustments in my driving style. People on street corners would gawk at me, and laugh, or shout things and point, or jump up and down like madmen. I'd be extremely confused until I remembered what the thing looked like on the outside. If for no other reason, I needed obvious visual reminders that my car wasn't the nondescript thing I had become used to driving.
My Dad and I worked up this snap-on dashboard piece, but it ended up being for special occasions only. It's big, it takes up my dash space, and it's all shiny aluminum (which looks nice, but it has this nasty tendancy to reflect sunlight back onto the inside of the windshield and into my eyeball while I'm driving in the daylight). It's got a bank of switches and glowey EL-wire things in it. Looks pretty cool, but it would only work while it was in, and if it were a special occasion I'd be inclined to remember anyway. I needed something permanent.
I was a little hesitant to follow thorugh with my idea to rip out the dome light, and install superbright white LEDs in both doors. After I'd drilled the first hole in the passenger-side door panel, though, it was a piece of cake. This process required me to run a decent amount of conduit around in the cabin, which finally served as a near-subliminal visual cue that I was basically driving the geek equivalent of the weenie wagon. And at night...
Well, I just plain love LED lighting. I was extremely happy.
Once again, I thought I was done. Then I met the Art Car people.