A few months ago, my good friend David Stefanelli asked me if I could make him a drawing of Weird Al Yankovic. He was invited to a show on August 5 by Kamal Asar, photographer for Weird Al’s tour in the US and he wanted to hand Alfred (Weird Al’s actual first name) a present for having him as a special guest.

I had surgery on my hand done, so it took a while before I could actually start making a serious attempt at it, but early july I finally finished my graphite drawing of Al. I added one of my business cards and wrote David’s address on the tube.

I rolled it up, put it in a tube and took it to the postal service for US Shipment. It was July 11, shipment should be in the US by July 20.

And then the stress began.

Somehow, the tube’s Track and Trace got stuck, or the tube itself got stuck, who knows, but it never got any further than “it’s arrived at our distribution center and is about to be shipped abroad.

Meanwhile it was July 27 and I really got worried about the tube because I still hadn’t received notification that the drawing had even left my country and was on a ship or a plane headed for the US. 

So David started making a backup plan, where he prints a digital version and then tells Weird Al that the actual drawing will be sent later.

In the meantime I contacted the postal service, complaining about the shipment that didn’t seem to happen. The guy on the other end of the phonecall tells me that the procedure for missing packages was that 25 days had to be passed, between handing over the package to the postal service and the complaint about it having gone missing,  before he could start an investigation into the whereabouts of my tube with Weird Al in it…. 25 days would be a day after the day Weird Al was supposed to get his gift. 

I was really bummed…but on July 28 I got a Whatsapp message from David, the tube had arrived…. Track and trace never said it was shipped to the US, but somehow it arrived…. in time for the show…..Isn’t that weird?

 

So on August 5, David attended the show. After the show he could not wait for his meet with Weird Al due to travelling home, but he gave the drawing to Kamal and Kamal handed it to Alfred…..who wore the exact same clothes as he did in the reference photo I used for my drawing…..Isn’t that Weird as well?