5: Love? No WAY

On Sun­day I meet with the agent and my friend who orga­nized the spon­sors. Instead of using logos on the Bill­board, we just used names and url’s divid­ed by hearts. That was the last step to get the art­work ready for the printer.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly the mon­ey wire didn’t go through before the week­end, so they denied the print­ing on Sun­day. If the mon­ey would arrive on Mon­day morn­ing, they would get the bill­board ready for mon­day afternoon.

After Meet­ing with my Agent and the Spon­sors we found a nice way of inte­grat­ing them.

That Evening I also met with a very good friend of mine the singer song­writer Lar­ry Edoff to com­pose a song. I had the idea to make some “We are the World“ like song that would go along with the project. We want­ed to get famous musi­cians to sup­port us. Many of them live in News York, just a phone call away, why not give it a try. We didn’t get it ready that night, there was just not enough time, but Lar­ry took his time lat­er on and com­posed and record­ed this beau­ti­ful song.

On Mon­day I was wait­ing for my agent to get news about the arrival of the mon­ey and from the print­er. At noon my agent called me with bad news: the Bill­board was denied by the bill­board rental com­pa­ny. The pol­i­cy of the bill­board own­ers didn’t allow to post a polit­i­cal state­ment. The “World” and “Love” were too polit­i­cal for 42nd Street. Wow. 

This was unex­pect­ed and a shock for me. After all this work and effort, so close to the fin­ish line, it was denied. LOVE was to polit­i­cal. This made me very angry. I want­ed to go to the press and sue the bill­board com­pa­ny for free­dom of speach. But then my friends con­vinced me to calm down, sleep over it and decide the next day. And thats what I did. I also learned that there is no free­dom of speach on bill­boards, because they are owned privatly.

That evening George W. Bush had his speech and announced his last ulti­ma­tum. The tim­ing would have been right, but there were forces beyond my con­trol block­ing the billboard.

The new Location

The next day I keept look­ing for oth­er spaces and skiped the Idea of going to the press. We decid­ed that it would be bet­ter to try to make it hap­pen, and then go to the press. I got new quotes from oth­er rental bill­board com­pa­nies. They were all sur­prised what hap­pened and tried to help out to find a new spot, but all the spots where tak­en. We then found a nice loca­tion on 47th Street, but only avail­able on May 1st. The loca­tion was real­ly nice and I decid­ed to post­pone, in the hope that also a month lat­er, this would get publicity.

The new loca­tion on 47th Street and 7th Avenue