Buffalo NY—The assessment that this year’s Super Bowl halftime show by Adam Levine and Maroon 5, was the worst in history drew strong disagreement from City Honors middle school doodle artist, Haley Muldenberry. The precocious seventh-grader not only loved the show, but found validation for her own endless doodling with each new layer of clothing frontman Adam Levine removed during the performance. The discarded clothing revealed a colossal amount of tattoos that Muldenberry thought looked like her school notebooks and the scraps of paper she draws on while texting with her more boring friends.
“OMG, I saw him with his shirt off and thought he looks just like my white pre-algebra folder, but without all the dumb equations inside. And that “butterfly’ on his hip is the same butterfly I draw all the time. I didn’t see any unicorns on him, but I’m really getting into unicorns. I hope he has some unicorns.” Muldenberry said barely able contain her excitement.
But it wasn’t just the similarity with images on a notebook or a butterfly that excited the seventh grader, Levine’s tattoos provided validation for her own artistic wanderings. One of the many annoying things Muldenberry’s mother does is go on and on about the people at Planet Fitness who cover their bodies in tattoos. She speaks about them in derogatory terms and says they look like the scapes of paper the young Muldenberry doodles on when she texts her boring friend from next store Isabella Avatinnie and it hurts her feelings. “I don’t go on and on about her purple teeth after she drinks her gallon of red wine every night. My mom should shut up about tattoos and my doodles,” she said.
Then there is her art teacher, Mr. Maldonato. He says that Muldenberry is wasting her time with doodles—that artistic renderings need a thematic unifying structure to give them power and meaning. But after seeing Adam Levine on the biggest stage in the world looking like the inside cover of her World Studies notebook when they were covering the Protestant Reformation she thinks Mr.Maldonato should go suck on his own unifying structure and leave her alone.
Feeling good about her doodles she has begun to reach out to Levine through social media with several unicorn drawings in the hopes that he would like one of her designs and incorporate it into the ever decreasing real-estate of his body that remains uninked. “He’s just gotta be a unicorn guy. He’s got a lion, a tiger a butterfly and an eagle, I just know he’ll love my unicorns,” she said.
Muldenberry is anxiously waiting for a response to her queries.
