| |
Just saw this on the front page of the Washington Post’s website:
Age 35, and Something Went Snap. The first part is about the Master Builders,
but several WAMALUG members and LUGNET posters are mentioned at the end.
Marc Nelson Jr.
Age 35, and Something Went Snap
With Legos, Grown-Ups Reclaim a Piece of the Past
By Tamara Jones
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 26, 2006; D01
The masters of the plastic universe are baffled. From their imaginations, their
computers, from their calloused fingers, magnificent kingdoms have sprung. They
can re-create the Seven Wonders of the World in a literal snap. But now they
huddle in their model shop of Legoland California and contemplate the seemingly
impossible:
How in the rectangular heck do you give a Lego bride a Lego bosom?
Tim Petsche considers miniature chef hats borrowed from a Lego kitchen set. Too
big. What about a couple of Lego daisies? someone else suggests. Too weird.
Too bad.
Such are the dilemmas of grown-ups in a child’s fantasy job.
Petsche and his five teammates are the salaried elite in a vast subculture of
adult Lego hobbyists whose collections of little plastic bricks overtake entire
rooms at home -- professors and lawyers and accountants and engineers who find a
creative outlet in the sturdy Danish blocks. People who reclaim and reassemble
lost childhoods piece by tiny piece.
“You go into what we refer to as the Dark Ages, when you stop playing with them
as a kid, but come back to them as an adult. Some people stop at 12, then break
out their Lego sets again at 30,” explains model builder Eric Hunter, 36, who
landed his dream job a year ago at America’s only Legoland, in the Southern
California coastal town of Carlsbad.
Hunter and the other master model builders work in a Carlsbad shop filled with
some 2,000 floor-to-ceiling bins full of virtually every piece Lego has created,
in every color (that would include the seven shades of pink). Outside in the
theme park, their obsession with detail is why a small black Lego rat can be
found in the New York subway display, and why Secret Service men on duty in
mini-D.C. all look alike and sport tiny earbuds.
“I have Lego thoughts and dreams,” Hunter says. “I’ll be driving down the
freeway and I’ll see a building and think, ‘Can I build that out of Lego?’ ”
His work is focused on a planned Las Vegas exhibit, due to open next spring in
the park’s Miniland U.S.A. Designers expect to use more than 2 million bricks to
build miniatures of famous Vegas hotels and casinos, complete with a tacky
wedding chapel and Lego showgirls.
Hunter is painstakingly putting together a miniature Excalibur Hotel, which, he
notes cheerfully, has 2,200 windows and 28 turret styles, details gleaned by a
Lego reconnaissance team dispatched to Vegas to study and photograph the real
thing.
Patience is a given for AFOLs, as Adult Friends of Lego are known. Hunter spent
a decade building his dream car out of more than 10,000 pieces: a ‘91 Acura NSX
that he fell in love with while working in a carwash. His Lego version was two
feet long and a foot high.
When he learned Legoland was holding a national competition to hire a new model
builder, Hunter made it to the semifinals with the scorpion he assembled when
given a bucket of 2,000 Lego pieces and 45 minutes to build any animal. He’d
taught himself to make a sphere out of squares, the required skill test for any
model shop hire. Hunter lost the contest, but networked in the Lego community
and visited the park often enough that the model shop manager remembered him
when another opening came up later. The pay is modest -- top scale is about
$45,000 a year -- but there’s a 10 percent employee discount on Legos, a perk
that adds up with a hobby that AFOLs say can easily devour thousands of dollars
a year.
The model builders take turns running inspection before the theme park opens
each morning. In Miniland, they make sure the presidential motorcade zipping
along Pennsylvania Avenue hasn’t been crushed by a renegade possum overnight,
and that no seagulls have strategically bombed the White House. They make sure
enthusiastic AFOLs haven’t pinched any of the discontinued bricks -- transparent
ones are particularly coveted -- for their private collections.
And they smile at their own inside jokes, such as the home brewery that the
model builders constructed and hid atop the model of the Kennedy Space Center,
and the Elvis impersonator amid the crowd of mini-commuters at Grand Central
Terminal. Then there’s the Lego body of Jimmy Hoffa, buried where no tourist
will ever see him, deep within a column of the new Freedom Tower in fake
Manhattan.
It’s an attention to detail shared by the AFOLs who gather for a monthly play
date in a deserted lounge at George Mason University’s Arlington campus, where a
dozen or so fans brought their Legos by the giant tub and jumbled boxful on a
recent Saturday.
Georgetown mathematician Judy Miller’s onion-domed reproduction of St. Basil’s
Cathedral posed delicately beneath the yellow crane that Abraham Friedman was
building higher and higher. Michael Harrod smiled bravely when a clumsy neighbor
accidentally decapitated his Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties sculpture.
“We used to have rules, bylaws, a lot of bureaucrats and heavy structure, and it
killed us,” Friedman, a software developer, says of the Washington Metro Area
Lego Users Group, or WAMALUG. “We used to have two-hour meetings and we’d argue
and discuss things forever. So we dissolved the constitution, got rid of the
rules. Now we’re just a social club. We hang out and build things.”
Besides showing off their latest projects and discussing construction
challenges, members also share sorting strategies. Dan Rubin, a 27-year-old
lawyer from Silver Spring, prides himself on his system of sorting by shape,
rather than color, the 400,000-some Lego pieces that his fiancee has consigned
to their basement.
“It’s easy to become obsessive about acquiring a certain piece instead of
building,” observes Magnus Lauglo, who is just coming out of a nine-month castle
phase to concentrate on military vehicles. His green tanks reflect a love of
military history and technology rather than a political statement, Lauglo says,
adding: “I don’t build in a sociopolitical vacuum, though. It’s impossible to
build these and not be aware there’s a war going on.”
Friedman is casting a critical eye on his finished crane. Judging from the width
of the boom and the size of the mini-figure construction worker standing on
site, he quickly calculates that the crane is not to scale: It wouldn’t be high
enough to erect a skyscraper in real life. He is disappointed, but considers the
four hours he spent building it well spent.
“Just the act of snapping the pieces together is so satisfying,” he explains,
not even looking down as his fingers connect one brick to another. “That click
when they go together.”
|
|
1 Message in This Thread:
- Entire Thread on One Page:
- Nested:
All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:
All | Brief | Compact
|
|
|
|
