Meet Lily Quinn

Lily Quinn is an aspiring 7yr old, Betty Crocker wannabe who spends all day and night baking cupcakes. Thing is, no one wants to buy Lily's cupcakes. Lily has to find a way to make her cupcakes more appeasing to the public...any suggestions?

Lily was created in my mind during a drive back from the Keys with my lil sisters. We were brainstorming about what we would do if we were in charge of production for Halloween Horror Nights and I had a vision of a Candy Land Horror Theme. Apparently we are your modern day Addams Family becase we all seem to have a knack for coming up with really obscene-dark humored ideas . So since ofcourse I cant even write my name in a legible manner, let alone draw a character, I had to call upon an expert, my lil sister Andi, to draw that brilliant creation of Lily Quinn you see above.

Andi is a genius 16-yr old aspirising artist/writer/director/ who is in the Art Magnet program at Coral Reef High School; her artistic brilliance is along the same level of Tim Burton (and Im not just saying that because she is my sister). If you saw us standing next to each other, you would never believe we were related and got along as well as we do. She is whiter than white, wears dark eyeliner that goes way below her eyes, has shaggy funky hair, and her closet might as well be an entire Hot Topic store. We lovingly call ourselves "The Goth and the Diva". Guess who's the diva..

Andi was brought into this world when I was 8. It was July 12th and I was at my best friend Katie's bday party at Hot Wheels about to get up on stage and do the Macarena when my step-dad arrived earlier than expected to pick me up.

"NOO!!! I DONT WANNA LEAVE YET!!!!!! NOT FAIR, NOT FAIR!!! UGH I CAN ALREADY TELL SHES A JEALOUS BRAT!"
(d-d-d-diva is a female version of stupid brat.)

So there went my 8 years spent as an only child. Now I had to share my parents attention with a girl who ruined my friend katie's bday party? I didnt even get to do the couples skate with my then bf danny! Lets just say I wasnt a happy camper so I refused to acknowledge her presense. I just went about my daily business as if nothing had changed and everything was still the same.

Something began to happen though. As Andi and I grew older, I became highly intrigued by the 3 yr old composing masterpiece works of art on the table cloth at Macarroni Grill. She would draw characters that I was pretty sure werent on the Disney movies we had just seen and they definitely were not on Blue's Clues. As the years went by, Andi drew more and more and even began writing short stories at the age of 6. She would run to me with a huge face of excitement every time she wrote anything and I would flip through the 10 page book of 3 lined pages, I started to know that this wasn't just a phase; I knew something was going to become of this, something that would continue on for many ages.

I was right. Andi kept at it, drawing and writing all day long, her mind was always somewhere else; she was in a land we didnt have access to but that I wanted so much to be a part of. As the pre-teen years began, Andi, and others, started realizing that she wasn't your average 10 yr old princess brat. While other girls were playing with barbies, Andi was in a corner drawing Manga and writing tim burton-esque stories. She began to get ridiculed at school and was always left out of the "cool crowd", or as she lovingly refers to them " the robots". Im not kidding you, she didnt even know anyones name because she REALLY couldnt tell them apart.

My mother, being thee most phenomenal person that she is, always comforted her and let her know that in the end, what goes around will always come around and that those that trim themselves to suit everyone will eventually whittle themselves away. The hardest year for Andi were her days at St. Thomas. Whats worse than robots? Cuban American Princess Robots. (I love all my CAPs out there, no hard feelings.)

Finally when high school came around, Andi was able to interview for a position at the Coral Reef Art Magnet program, a world reknown art program full of freedom of expression and fellow artists like herself; a school where its finally cool to be "different". Andi currently has an art website that has over thousands of views and comments and is going to be featured in a national art magazine coming out soon. She plans on attending California Institute of the Arts to pursue her dreams as an animator/writer. Although we sometimes want to go "lily quinn" on eachother and may have plenty of differences, she is my inspiration, my adoration, and above all, my lil gothic best friend.

"You laugh at me because I'm different; I laugh at you because you are all the same"