Hints from Hell-Louise

We had a party. We have new white chairs.
You can imagine.

Not red wine...just the black sole of a little girl’s shoe...black and gray from living.

Big dirt stain.

I used water to try to get rid of it. The water dried. It left a brown water mark. I knew better than to let water sit on material all night.

The material is made from canvass. It has that very light speckled brown in the white.

Adam, my recognized-by-the-state-of-California-Domestic-Partner, brought home two spot removers. One turns things brownish. One bleaches--but you have to rub.
Together, a lot was accomplished...but then there was a bigger problem.

Some sort of batting exists under the white canvass. The more I worked the fabric, the color came up from the batting and stained the chair, right in the middle of the seat...far away from the original dirt. A whole new problem: Reddish-purple-brown. Like dried blood. In a few spots right in the middle.

Oh my goodness.

So I used hydrogen peroxide and a blowdryer. This helped, but not nearly enough.

Bleach on a cotton ball took out the red-brown stain.

But then, I had this big bleached spot.

So today, I made tea...used a toothbrush to apply the tea to calm down the bleached area.

Sprayed the browner stain remover, mixed with hydrogen peroxide. Speckled in a fine spray. Blowdryer.

Eventually, I ended up with a very decent looking chair except for two darkish brown spots...I continued to use a spray bottle of hydrogen peroxide and the blowdryer to get to the right color on those spots. Sometimes I used a toothbrush to really scrub in the hydrogen peroxide. But you have to be careful---because you can get brown lines...so speckle-spraying is better.

It went on and on...but it appealed to my perfectionist tendencies.

This was brilliant physical therapy between eight hours of reworking my television pilot. One feels guilty for procrastination. But people who create with the mind need to do things with their hands. It frees you up. And you end up with the chair how nature intended it to be.

In my television pilot (because the agents told me to do it)—I have more death and mayhem. Someone actually gets run over by a Brinks Truck. And the maid, running away from the I.N.S., eats the Virgin-Mary-Quesadilla that her daughter was trying to sell on ebay as the maid escapes through her kitchen window. Because in the world of television, these are the kinds of things that happen, so I’m told.

I think I’ll do a few more coats of Hydrogen Peroxide tomorrow. The chair is so close to being back to perfect. Control—anything to control.