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<\/a>2) \u201cThe First Wally Adventures\u201d<\/span> (mid-1980s) These are the very early Wally pots that look a lot like they are drawn by a child. The artwork is crude, and the jokes are incredibly simple: \u201cWally sees God\u201d, \u201cWally meets visitors from outer space\u201d, \u201cWally eats visitors from outer space\u201d, etc.<\/p>\nPermit me to indulge myself for just a bit here and let us imagine that it\u2019s one hundred years in the future and Wallyware pottery has become a collectable item. For the record, I never tell fans of my work … Continue reading <\/a>3) \u201cHappy Wedding, Julia and Keifer. Love, Wally\u201d<\/span> (1991) Inspired by the big celebrity news of the day, this joke was drawn on only a couple dozen plates. (Note the painted-on sale price sticker!) A few years after I created it, one of the galleries that shows my work sold it to a friend of Julia Roberts who allegedly gave it to the academy award winning actress. How fun!
\n<\/a>4) \u201cWhile negotiating a labor contract with Zigfried and Roy, Wally encourages his clients to get tough with management\u201d<\/span> (1990s) I created this joke for a fine craft store in the MGM Grand at Las Vegas and it sold pretty well for them. It was kind of creepy in 2003 when the news broke about Roy Horn getting attacked by his tigers.
\n<\/a>5) \u201cWally and Up with People sing their way into the Guinness Book of records in a ditch in Waco, Texas\u201d<\/span> (1993) I made less than a dozen of these just one week before the Branch Davidian compound was burned to the ground by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. We shipped the first ones out to Twist Gallery in Oregon, and they arrived the exact same day as the tragedy. The gallery owner called us and said, \u201cWe need to send these back.\u201d
\n<\/a>6) The \u201cWally and OJ\u201d series<\/span>: 1995 was a real boom time for us with the OJ trial. The Geraldo Rivera joke was the first, and Geraldo himself held up a mug with this cartoon on his TV show. We did a series of spin-off adventures about the trial, and the high point of it all was sending a batch of plates off to the prosecution lawyers for a special order from the DA of Los Angeles, Gil Garcetti. I even got to talk to Gil on the phone one day. It was so weird!
\n<\/a>7) The Oregon Bach Festival series<\/span> (1990s): For a string of about five or six years, my account in Eugene, New Twist, would order commemorative Wally designs for the Oregon Bach Festival. They were a big hit with the musicians at the festival, and the subjects of the jokes were wonderfully esoteric.
\n<\/a>8) The Provincetown gay theme series<\/span>: In 2004 I received a really huge order for ten different gay themed Wally adventures for my account in Provincetown, MA. That summer we produced a couple hundred pots with Wally as a drag queen, Wally as a giant ape carrying female impersonator Ray Fay to the top of a skyscraper, Wally cuddling with \u201cThe Bears\u201d etc. It was quite the left-wing soapbox tour de force!
\n<\/a>9) \u201cThe Unsinkable Molly Brown Spittoon\u201d <\/span>(2008) Every year I donate something to Rocky Mountain PBS station and this year I got inspired and created an epic tale to grace a spittoon. It sold for $250.00\u2026 cheap! It\u2019s definitely a one of a kind.<\/a>10) \u201cWally creates the ultimate political reality TV show: \u2018The Perils of Palin\u201d and \u201cWally defends Sarah Palin\u2019s stand on hunting wolves with helicopters with some folksy backwoods wisdom\u201d<\/span> (2008) These two adventures celebrate the overwhelming national spotlight on that spunky right-wing Alaskan governor that dropped into our laps a few months ago. I\u2019m hoping that she will go away now, but only time will tell.
\n<\/a>If you happen to have any old Wally ceramics out there that might be worthy of this list, feel free to post the titles below. The really odd thing about doing this line of pottery for as long as I have is the fact that there are pots out there that I don\u2019t even remember making. I have shoe boxes full of photos and memorabilia, but I don\u2019t have records of everything I\u2019ve done. It\u2019s going to be an interesting task for folk art historians of the future to nail down all those esoteric designs out there!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"