Marilyn Monroe is intact and ready to return to Floyd’s Diner on Yates Street after her second off-the-wall experience in a year.
A section of the eatery’s signature mural, which depicts the enduring celebrity, turned up Monday outside Royal Athletic Park, where the Victoria HarbourCats were in action. Floyd’s operates a food venue at HarbourCats games, so staff members there were excited when word reached them that Marilyn’s face was back.
Since HarbourCats assistant general manager Brad Norris-Jones is the one who spotted the piece of the mural, plans were made to present it to its rightful owners at Tuesday’s game.
The mural, which depicts Marilyn Monroe wrapped in silk bed sheets and cracking an egg into a glass, is painted on plywood and is about 3.5 metres long. It had been mounted on an exterior wall at the Floyd’s for just a few months when it first went missing in August 2014. It was recovered after a few weeks.
Part of the mural — the section depicting Marilyn’s face — went missing again July 23.
The remaining pieces, which were damaged in the theft, were taken down and placed in storage, said Joel O’Rourke, a server at the restaurant.
“It was kind of torn off the wall a bit,” O’Rourke said of the stolen piece. “The back piece where we had it connected is a bit torn up, but really nothing that affects the esthetics of the front.”
In the previous theft, the entire mural was taken off the wall outside Floyd’s. The artwork eventually turned up in an alley, behind a garbage bin.
Plenty of customers have been asking about the mural, O’Rourke said. He said staff heard from a witness, saying someone was seen walking off with the head section, but security cameras put in after the first incident failed to provide any evidence.
“It’s a good story,” O’Rourke said of the first theft. “Once all is said and done, we can laugh about it. When it happens second time, it kind of gets a bit old.
“We don’t want this to become an annual affair.”
O’Rourke said the mural’s high profile as a result of the thefts increased the likelihood that the stolen piece would be returned.
“People knew too much about it already for it to go unnoticed. We’re all happy to get it back, but I don’t think any one of us was too surprised,” he said.
O’Rourke said the mural could be reinstalled in about a week, complete with a few needed touch-ups by artist Paul Archer.
