Mackswell Sherman almost blew out Sarah Jones' eyeballs

Name: Mackswell Sherman and Sarah Jones (a.k.a. Ruffeo Hearts Lil Snotty)

Age: 20-something; 26

Hometown: Anacortes, WA; Houston, TX
Current town: Brooklyn, NY
Job description: Clothing designers
Bio: Founders of label Ruffeo Hearts Lil Snotty, in boutiques nationwide (including Patricia Field); masterminds behind the Sars Guard hoodie and the Quadricepticon bodysuit
Select links: Sewing How-To's with RHLS (YouTube); Ruffeo and Mo Rocca on Martha Stewart (YouTube); RHLS in These Are Powers music video (YouTube); RHLS on Etsy

Describe your current state of mind.

Sarah Jones: I feel pretty much like this emoticon skirt right now, pretty stoked but kind of haggard and really filthy, covered in dirt. We’ve been working for the past few months except for maybe two days off. We’ve been pulling two all nighters in a row to get ready for Fashion Week. I have to get a LookBook done. We did it all so I feel out of it, recovering, battered, but really happy about what happened and moving forward.

Mackswell Sherman: I slept from 9 to 2 o’clock.

SJ: I woke you up and said, “Do you want to get a drink at Roberta’s?” And you said, “I hear those guys are pretty good guys.” You were so asleep.

MS: She’s more capable of working without sleep. I’ll do two all-nighters in a row and then sleep for 17 hours. And I just have to baby my mind because I’m doing design all the time and things outside of clothing design. I think maybe my state of mind is Rocky Road, right now.

Paulie Anne Duke's grandmother carries a .45

Photo: Tod Seelie, courtesy of Paulie Anne Duke

Name: Paulie Anne Duke
Age: 22
Hometown: Kitty Hawk, NC
Current town: West Oakland, CA
Job description: Builder; musician; performer
Bio: Crew member of Miss Rockaway Armada in Philly; performed and built at Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont

Upcoming projects: “Build a shack in New Bedford; build and tour with a suitcase puppet show; record an EP; try and start a metal band? Getting out of the country 2012.”

Select links: "Circus Song" video (vimeo); performance at Amnesia in San Francisco (YouTube), Cakebread Castle in Oakland (flickr)

 
Describe your current state of mind.

Relaxed and satisfied.  I have been working really hard all year and this is the first time I have really relaxed.  I just wrapped up everything in Philly with the Miss Rockaway Armada, and left satisfied with the turnout.  We saved a lot of the usable wood left over from all of the rafts and brought them up to New Bedford, Massachusetts to build a shack on the waterfront. Which is a total dream. We decided to wait until the spring to start building so I am finally having a real vacation this summer.  I have been waking up and going swimming naked in the Atlantic in the morning, and it feels great…

Catherine Yeager understands the grievances of toy demonstrators

Name: Catherine Yeager

Age: 30

Hometown: Westchester and suburban Pennsylvania

Current town: Brooklyn, NY

Job description: Actor; licensed massage therapist, specializing in Eastern Studies

Bio: Collaborated with Madagascar Institute, Dark Passage, and Swimming Cities Ocean of Blood; puppeteer for Robin Frohardt's The Pigeoning at St. Anne's Warehouse; resident actor at 3 Legged Dog multimedia theater company and other Off Broadway theater companies; member of ChunKlundt, a two-woman artist team (productions include If You're Really Still It Might Go Away, SPthspthlthspth, etc.); played Clara Belmont in Jeff Stark's subway play, I.R.T.: A Tragedy in Three Stations

Upcoming projects: Massage Therapy/Acupuncture business with Timothy Mckewon; CATS Zipline Dinner Theater, a theatrical adaptation of The Giver

Select links: "In the Subway, Moving Theater, In More Ways Than One" (NY Times)

How did you get into massage therapy?

I was doing work at theaters and it still wasn’t paying what I could live on. I was nannying a lot and I just got to the point like, “I can’t take care of kids anymore!” in rehearsal. Like this is driving me crazy; I need to look at alternate careers. It was between massage therapy or child-life services, where you work with terminally ill children and do art therapy. I wanted something that I could be self-employed in, didn’t have to work [long] hours. I wanted to work with my hands and help people. I went to my first “You Can Try It Out” at the Swedish Institute, and I got a really big, fat, hairy, smelly man that I had to massage, you know what I mean? It was one of those things where I was like, “Here’s the gauntlet. You’re going to be okay with this?” And I loved the work. I had a very close friend who unfortunately passed away from cancer. But she really introduced me to body work and alternative medicine. The way that it helped her and the work that I received sort of changed my life, too. And thankfully, I love it and I find it to be very creative. Every body’s different. There are constantly different tricks you can put in your bag, different modalities. And it’s always personal. It can be draining but it’s incredibly rewarding.

Molly Crabapple fancies bacon and scotch

Name: Molly Crabapple 

Age: 28

Hometown: Far Rockaway, Queens

Current town: New York, NY

Job description: Illustrator; muralist; former burlesque dancer and art model

Bio: Recently completed an intense succession of drawings for "Week in Hell"; immersed London's Box Soho with 90 feet of drawings; founded of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School

Select links: “Molly Crabapple’s Occupy Wall Street ‘Vampire Squid’ Poster, for your printing/stenciling pleasure” (WSJ.com); “Molly Crabapple’s ‘Week in Hell’ Photos" (ANIMAL); “Gallery Girls, Dr. Sketchy and LA’s Sexy Underground Drawing Clubs” (LA Weekly); “A World Drawn From Wild Tastes” (NY Times); mollycrabapple.com 

Describe your current state of mind. 

I’m kind of exhausted right now. I just finished a project called “Week in Hell” where I locked myself in a hotel room, and I did 270 feet of drawings in 12 days. And I think it kind of broke me at the end. I did an interview for A&E today about Andy Warhol, which was cool, but I had to do lots of research. 

What was it like doing so much in so little time? 

It was painful. The idea was to do so much in so little time, that I thought it would break me past my clichés and past what I was used to. Like “force-able inspiration” is how I would put it. It was amazing, but it was really hard at the end. I kind of broke down into a little shivering ball. I was on live stream and I spoke on my Internets for a while.