High-Heeled Hijacker
We’ve all heard rumors of alien abductions. But when my booth went AWOL at the 1986 Air Force Association Conference in Washington, DC, it wasn’t abducted by bubble-headed aliens, it was shanghaied by a vindictive transvestite.

While working as a project coordinator for a now-defunct design house, I was responsible for three exhibits at three concurrent shows for our client, a Forbes 1,000 defense contractor. So while I was supervising an exhibit install in Seoul, Korea, I had colleagues installing exhibits at the Farnborough Air Show in England, and my boss, Geoff Siodmak, was overseeing the installation of a custom 40-by-60-foot booth at the Air Force show in Washington.

Roughly four days before the Washington show, everything was going well in England, and my biggest problem in Korea was making sure my translated signage panels were installed so they’d read properly in Korean. But my well-orchestrated plans hit a sour note at 4 a.m. Korean time when my hotel phone rang with an urgent message from my boss: The exhibit I’d designed and shipped to Washington was MIA.

Had I been awake enough to panic, I’d have woken Seoul with my screams. Not only was our booth unaccounted for, but our scheduled installation time was tight. So even if the booth showed up the next day, my well-laid plans were already in jeopardy.

To make matters worse, the booth had been custom made for that show. The exhibit hall was a converted parking garage, and the booth had been designed to sit on an 18-inch raised floor and fit around eight pillars. The booth also featured custom theatrical lighting, interactive displays, and several intricate scale replicas of the company’s aircraft, which were key to the client’s sales strategy. Thus, generic rental properties wouldn’t suffice, and a total recreation would be impossible to complete prior to the show. So my best bet was to retrace its steps and try to locate it.

I’d flown the booth into John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, where our freight forwarders were supposed to load the booth into a semi and drive it from New York to Washington. Since I knew the booth had made its way onto the flight, I figured the problem started when the property landed in New York. So my first step was to contact my rep at the freight forwarder, who, unfortunately for him, was traveling with me in Korea. After I woke him out of a dead sleep, my bleary-eyed rep quickly called his office back in the states, hoping that the truck had merely been delayed.

He soon learned, however, that his company had contracted our job to a subcontractor, which then farmed out the job to an independent truck driver. After following the degrees of separation, the freight company discovered that the subcontractor owed the independent driver money, and the driver had decided to keep the cargo until he’d been paid. Thus, the semi — along with my booth — had quietly disappeared.

With my booth held hostage, presumably in West Virginia where the trucker lived, I felt the clock ticking on our effort to get an exhibit set up for our client. Given the booth’s one-off design, our rogue trucker friend couldn’t have picked a worse bundle of freight to burgle.

While the freight company contacted the boothnapper about his demands, Geoff and I knew we couldn’t just sit around hoping that our booth would show up. Thus, we decided to build a less-extravagant version of the lost booth.

While my home office faxed blueprints of the booth to my boss, I called our office to have negatives of the booth’s large photo murals sent to Washington. Over the next 18 hours, I burned up the phone lines with a Washington-area exhibit house, trying to help it recreate our booth from scratch, using little else but the blueprints, some negatives, and my feeble memory.

While I burned the candle at both ends, taking care of my exhibit in Seoul while keeping my finger on the pulse of the catastrophe in Washington, the freight company decided to step in and solve the payment issue between the subcontractor and the driver. After the freight company wired the driver some money, its attorneys encouraged him to put the pedal to the metal to get the exhibit to Washington.

But with about 36 hours left on our installation schedule, we realized that we’d never round up all of the pieces and put up an entire booth from scratch before the show opened. Thus, we decided to build a façade entrance to the booth and set up some display areas where we could showcase the product models if they ever arrived. Our plan was to build the booth in sections, hiding the unfinished areas behind drapes, then to continue to work on it as opportunities presented themselves during the show, such as during long session breaks, and when the show closed on the first night.

About 12 hours before the show opened, however, our plan took a good, yet rather odd, turn. As Geoff and our staff worked on the booth through the night, they heard a semi pulling into the loading docks and rushed over to see if our missing exhibit had arrived. Realizing that their truck had finally come in, they all breathed a huge sigh of relief. And that’s when the truck’s cab door swung open and out popped the driver — a transvestite in a dress and makeup. “Hi, I’m April Love,” he said.

Trying hard to ignore the facial hair on the 6-foot-2-inch dude in the dress, they put their focus on the contents in the back of the truck, and began unloading items and carting them to our space as fast as they could.

Combining elements from the original booth and what they had erected before the flamboyant driver arrived, our crew had about half of the booth completed in time for the show’s opening and, as planned, we curtained off the rest. On the first day, the installation crew moved out the work ladders as attendees hit the show floor.

Taking every spare opportunity to finish up — when the exhibit hall closed for a lunch break on the first day of the show, along with that entire night — our crew was able to offer visitors a completed, though less extravagant than planned, booth on the second day. In the end, attendees never knew the difference between what we had planned and what they saw on day two.

While it was good to know we could overcome a disaster when one arose, I hope to never run afoul of a transvestite trucker again. Because no matter how much you plan for a smooth ride, one might take your plans, and your booth, on an unplanned detour.

— Tom Bowman, president, Bowman Design Group Inc., Signal Hill, CA