(Music)
A quilter walks into a bar,
in Wyoming,
in the 1990s,
asks for a beer. Bartender's drawing his beer, casually
asks over his shoulder, "What brings you to town stranger?"
And I said, "Oh, I'm over in the
motel teaching quilting classes."
Bartender reaches out as far as he
can, and says, "Come here," and kind of backs up a step and
crosses his arms across his chest, and asks,
"Do you hunt?"
It's a trick question,
since it's a semi-official Wyoming lifestyle
quiz in short form.
I meekly answered that some of my best friends were hunters,
and I think guns are nice and shiny.
And a four-wheeled drive pickup is a real
sexy car, and it's
nice to get away with the boys and have a weekend all
by yourselves with the boys. But I prefer to spend my weekends
shut up in a hotel full of women talking about their bed covers.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
My son was thirteen years old
the year I decided to close my bridge construction company,
and become a professional quilter,
and things changed dramatically around our house.
He didn't bring friends home from school anymore.
My invitation to career days
at the seventh grade presentation was canceled.
And things went along like this for a
few years, until, the
computers in our office were too much of a draw for he and his friends.
And, they would come over and leave
me and play in their Dungeons & Dragons and whatever else on the computers.
And his friend Andrew told his dad
I had graduated from Montana State University the same
year and the same curriculum as his father had. And he went over and told his
dad that he was over at John Flynn's house and
John Flynn was a quilter and he traveled around the world teaching people to quilt.
And his father said, "Well that isn't the John Flynn I know."
The John Flynn I know graduated
as a civil engineer, went to Vietnam as an
intelligence specialist, and came back and joined his father in bridges.
Andrew being
a typical teenage conspiracy theorist,
immediately decided that I had
not quit the military intelligence community,
but was using the quilting as the perfect cover
to travel way around the world
and see what was going on.
I have dibs on "Perfect Cover"
for my memoirs that I write.
My opinion of perfect cover is a hand-quilted
quilt and, these are the people that did the best
this year.
(Music)