Anthurium no. 1446 "Kayla Krawford"

Kayla didn't make much of an impression either way, though I suppose on balance she's good; not the most interesting color, but the spathe is pretty well-formed,

and resisted thrips well. This is the same bloom six weeks later:

The leaves are also fairly resistant to thrips, if not 100% so:

And there's also the fact that it bloomed early; it was only 17 months old.¹ Kayla's seed parent, 0282 Dave Trading, was the same color² and also produced a first bud very early (15 months), and then I lost Dave in The Great Purge to thrips. Dave was mainly noteworthy for its (large) size and speed of blooming, not its beauty or originality, but even so it would be nice to have a replacement for him, so I think I'm going to try to keep Kayla.

At the moment, this is logistically difficult; there just isn't room for the number of seedlings I have. I just moved up seven seedlings from 3-inch to 4-inch pots, but should have promoted three times that many, easily -- trying to decide who got to move on was agonizing. So while I would really like to hang on to Kayla as a Dave substitute, I'm not sure it's going to be possible.

Should maybe note that Kayla is from seedling group EQ;³ the only prior EQ seedling is 1447 Daesha Richards, who also bloomed very early (13 months!) and often, and is almost indistinguishable in photos from 0282 Dave Trading. Though Kayla's doing much better with the thrips, and Daesha's blooms were of wildly varying quality.

The drag queen Kayla Krawford is from Arizona, and is a former Miss Gay Arizona USofA at Large, a very complicated title that I don't quite understand, though I guess I don't need to.

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¹ Median time from sowing a seed to the first bud is currently 26 months.
The quickest two (0058 Betty Larsony and 1716 Tess LeCoil) took 12 months, though neither bud actually opened; Betty didn't complete a bloom until a couple years after the first bud. Tess's first bud happened in January; she hasn't tried again yet.
I'm still waiting for a bud from a lot of the seedlings, but the longest wait for a seedling that actually did produce a bud still belongs to 0105 Deanne T. Christ (54 months), which has since produced a lot of blooms. Apparently it was just waiting for me to move it to a bigger pot.
The point being that 17 months for a bud that actually opened is pretty fast, and Kayla was in a 3-inch pot the whole time, even.
² Red/yellow changing to red/white. Almost indistinguishable in photos without any objects to indicate size:

L: 0282 Dave Trading. R: 1446 Kayla Krawford.³ (0282 Dave Trading / 15 September 2015)

Anthurium no. 1372 "Shelita Taylor"

Shelita's pretty nearly the twin of 1373 Donet McKim, also from the EG seedling group;

it seems reasonable to assume that they're full siblings. None of the descendants of the NOID pink-green so far have been even a little bit weird (two red/beige, one red/red, one pink/pink), which is very disappointing. I suppose it's possible that the second generation will be more interesting.

Though Shelita's probably not going to have anything to do with the second generation. The most interesting thing about her is the new leaf color:

which is genuinely attractive even if the old leaves look the same as any other Anthurium leaf.

But. You can see all the thrips damage in those photos. Donet was almost untouched by the thrips, but Shelita is just mutilated, which I think is enough to cancel out the new leaves. Were it not for the thrips, I think she'd be worth keeping around (if only to keep the NOID pink-green's genes in circulation), but reality is that her days here are probably numbered. Which is too bad, but hey, it has to happen sometimes.

Shelita Taylor the drag queen is from Port St. Lucie, Florida, and seems to favor Madonna's better material (Vogue, Express Yourself). As usual for performances recorded from inside a club, the audio quality is lousy and the video needs about 30 seconds taken off the beginning, but Express Yourself is at least not ear-shreddingly bad, and she's nailed the choreography:

Anthurium no. 1299 "Sinthia D Meanor"

Behold Sinthia D Meanor:

Not what you'd call "conventionally attractive," I suppose. I mean, a lot of people don't like aroid blooms in general, and of those who do, I'm guessing beige and misshapen aren't high on the desirable qualities list. But Sinthia is hands down the most interesting and unexpected seedling I've seen so far; there was no reason to think that beige was a possible spathe color,¹ and the odd but (so far) consistent shape is also unique as far as I can recall.²

The color does change over time; mostly they get greener. Here's a photo of an old spathe (left) with a just-opened one (right):

The foliage is also a little oddly-shaped, though not as extreme,

and there's some thrips damage here and there. Less than average, but still there.

I've managed to pollinate the flowers, which is somewhat visible in the old/new comparison photo above but is really obvious now (sorry, I don't have any photos of it); although some of the pollinated blooms on other seedlings lately have died before the berries had matured, I'm hopeful that Sinthia will be able to produce equally-weird offspring someday; it might be nice to have a whole flock of beige, vaguely moth-like blooms.³

(24 May 2017)

(same bloom, 26 May 2017)
The real-life Sinthia D Meanor is from Dayton, Ohio; I had a difficult time finding a video with even passable sound quality, or any information that wasn't just "she's from Ohio." But there is at least a real performer who goes by this name.

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¹ Though it's clear enough, in retrospect, how the color came to be: it's basically a very light pinkish-orange that also happens to have a tiny amount of chlorophyll in the spathe too. Both pieces have happened before, individually. There's no shortage of light pinkish-orange spathes (0097 Colin Ambulance, 0317 Dred, 0328 Polly Esther Blend, etc.). Green is less common, but it's happened too, either as a slight bronzing of an orange (0330 Faye Quinette), a darkening of a red (0005 Chad Michaels, 0842 Pretty Punasti), or all by itself on the edges of an otherwise white spathe (1268 Li'l Miss Hot Mess). So given enough time, it was inevitable that the two pigments would wind up together; I just hadn't considered the possibility until it happened.
² Some other seedlings have produced unusual spathe shapes too, just not this particular shape. Squat, kidney-shaped spathes have been really popular lately; a few seedlings have produced long, narrow spathes. One (0290 RuPaul Charles) liked to make spathes that had weird notches on the margins, about halfway between the tip and the base, though it grew out of that.
³ This is actually pretty unlikely, given how weird Sinthia actually is. Even if she were normal, her seedlings are unlikely to resemble her that much -- as we've progressed through the second generation seedlings, I've been surprised at how little relationship there appears to be between parent and child sometimes. Somewhat dull seed parents produce offspring with unexpected colors (e.g. the pink/pink 0273 Wes Coast producing the orange/yellow or orange/orange 0788 Owen McCord, or the purple-turning-to-pink 'Joli' yielding the red-turning-to-orange 1171 Chris of Hur). Similarly, unusual seed parents with highly desirable traits often wind up producing dull pink/pinks and red/yellows (like the NOID pink-green, which so far has produced two red/yellows, 1372 Shelita Taylor and 1373 Donet McKim, a red/red, 1750 Dreuxilla Divine, and a pink/pink, 1752 Reyna Terra Esova).
I mean, some of the surprises are easy to account for since I don't know anything about the pollen parents, and I wouldn't actually want the offspring to all look just like the seed parents. But it does kind of suck to realize that the children of 1268 Li'l Miss Hot Mess or 1299 Sinthia D Meanor are most likely to be red/yellow or pink/pink, just like all the other plants' offspring.