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Okay so this isn't me.... but it IS someone on my first scooter... I was at art school when I had it, and used it as a prop for some of my photo assignments. Someone once asked me if he could put it in his living room (of course another art student, who else?).... just to look at, as an art installation. Scooters really do make lovely fashion accessories, and besides, you can buy 'scooter jewellry' for it, and add stuff like mirrors, and chrome - LOTS of CHROME-.

It was a 1982 Vespa 100, and originally a show piece taken by the dealership to the local motorcycle shows. Everything it had on it, came with it, for a remarkable price. It only had two mechanical problems: it flooded too easily (I became an expert at whipping out the spark plug and cleaning it off with emery paper... much to the amusement once of a jock cop, who thought he might help the poor little damsel in distress, who then promptly kick-started it and took off in a cloud of two-stroke smoke), and the clutch cable gave me no end of grief, that is, until we discovered that some twit had put a P200E clutch cable casing into it before we bought it (longer, I guess!).

Streetcar tracks in Toronto can be a challenge, at least the first time the wheel gets stuck in the groove (!).  Hydroplaning down a very steep hill near Casa Loma during a sudden thunderstorm was also an invigorating experience. Arriving at school looking like Tammy Faye Bakker on a crying jag because the wind was so cold was also fun, particularly with the inevitable 'helmet-head'. But I loved my Vespa with a passion. Sometimes I would drive home, and just keep driving..... for hours.

Suffering from temporary insanity and a loss of nerve (after having one too many yuppie assholes force me off the road because it just did not sit well with their inflated egos to be behind a scooter, even if I WAS going 20 km's over the speed limit), I sold it for the same $ I bought it for 5 years earlier, and promptly bought a 1979 Austin Mini. Thinking four wheels would be safer than two, I soon learned I was mistaken... at least in North America, where the other cars on the road are always GIGANTIC in comparison! When I heard that one of the reasons they weren't imported into Canada anymore, because the Ministry of Transport INSISTED on steel beams reinforcing the doors (and the Mini, at least that year didn't have them!), I rethought my plan.

Years later, the Mini sold to a friend with an apparent  death wish and eccentric attraction to weird little cars, I became vehicle-less. This was not always such a problem: unlike the American way of life (thus spake the observer from the Great White North), living downtown in a large city who's urban core has still not turned into a ghost town in favour of big-box-store-malls-in-the-'burbs, I was able to still get around and pursue my career as 'Art Chick'.

NOW I have a 1979 Vespa 100 ? the kind with the turn signals on the ends of the handle grips, which, strangely, I bought from the friend-who-bought-the-Mini-with-a-death-wish.

Here's my new scooter - a 1979 Vespa 100. Its a bit of an oddity: Scooterworks in Chicago told me that it was a European model made for the German market and it strangely made its way here to Canada.

This makes it occasionally tough to find stuff for it (the wheels are 4 bolt, not 5 so standard hubs don't fit, and when we recently brought it down to Chicago for the Slaughterhouse 5 Rally, everyone was curious about the handle-grip turn signals. Luckily its easy to mail order replacement lenses from Europe, otherwise I'd have a problem!!!

(this is is called "Bathing the Cat, Part II"... what did you expect from an artchick?)

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