At the Blackball gallery, with a striped dress on, Alexa stands by her work. She is shy, but direct and laughs often when speaking about the art world. Her tableaux reprise mythical imagery within the context of 1950s American advertising. The room has one window that leads into an indoor storage area. Green carpet.

Downstairs, the paint has dried around the nipples and stomach of a friend of another artist. She picks up a tray of glasses and bounces around, serving too-sweet sparkling wine to the guests. Tobacco smoke and mumbly conversations waft up the stairs and disperse in the light. Weaving to the back of the gallery one finds an ad-hoc bar where the drinks cannot be bought for lack of a license, and the owner, Fantastic Negrito, strums a guitar. Prints of varying quality are for sale on a rack.

Her marriage disintegrated a few years after landing in the states, so her ex husband stands a few feet away from her, smiling and laughing with some mutual friends. He leaves to play "football" with an evening league. To her right is the largest piece, a landscape of a family roasting electric green franks over a neon flame in what looks to be outer space. Bright blue aureolas surround them, the beehive hairdo of the mother, the crew-cuts of her sons. Part of the irony is that they do not look concerned. Blending oil, gouache, and watercolor to achieve a distorted effect, she renders a man relaxing in an armchair. the living room scene is normal and detailed. The only anomaly is that he wears a large knights armored helmet over his face and neck.

Other rooms display the giclée prints and "analog collages" of other artists. A wide range of observers and participants move slowly through the rooms, talking and laughing. In the parking lot, over a cigarette, Joe tells me that they're looking into buying a house. With his salary, and the prime loan rates given by the UC system, he could make it happen. Back inside, he jumps up and down a little bit. In ten days, he will be an economics professor. "I love my job," he says gleefully. It all comes together, after enough years counting change for laundry, if you keep putting your feet one after another in the same direction.

Of course, any development economist knows that this is only true for the lucky ones, who ate well as children, who were born in first-world countries, who benefitted from schooling. We are the lucky ones. Don't forget that we are the lucky ones.