Inger Borstad is best known around the Yuba College campus as “the girl who made the Flavors sign,” which hangs over the student-run campus restaurant, but if you spend some time talking to her, you’ll learn that she is one of the most interesting students to attend Yuba College.
When Inger was a child, she lived in Jamaica with her sister and mother, who was an underwater photographer. While there Inger worked for national universities as a scuba diver, retrieving specimens from the sea. Inger’s family left Jamaica when she was in her teens and moved to Northern California, where she attended high school.
While still in her teens Inger decided that she wanted to see what the world had to offer. So with $76 to her name, she packed up and headed north with a family friend to Portland, Oregon, where she was dropped off. With nothing but life ahead of her, she headed even further north to Seattle, Washington, which she called home for nine years.
During those years Inger was a jack of all trades. She worked as a bartender in Pioneer Square, a construction worker across from the Space Needle, managed a dry-cleaning business, worked at Pike Place Market and was a seamstress, which is the reason she is an expert at sewing giant Tarot cards for a nightclubs.
While Inger managed a drycleaners, she owned a street side hotdog stand called “Moon Dogs” at night, where she would dress up in costumes and wigs while serving smoking hot hotdogs to hungry patrons until 3a.m.
While in the Seattle area, Inger lived on an island with the professor from “Gilligan’s Island” for a couple of years before she moved inland to the city. The city was tough on her. After surviving two attempted kidnappings, Inger felt she had to leave Seattle for a while.
She decided to hit the road again, only this time it was on tour with a reggae band called Clinton Fearson and the Boogie Brown Band.
When she returned from the road, Inger learned that the apartment building she was staying in was being demolished. She ended up moving to the base of the Cascade Mountains where she became a caretaker for a bed and breakfast for nine months.
When it was time to leave the bed and breakfast, Inger had nowhere to go, so she decided to travel the world. She put her belongings in storage and left the bed and breakfast, holding a ticket to Sweden. She hopped from country to country, seeing ancient ruins and everything else the world had to offer. She went from Sweden to Norway to Ireland to wherever else she wanted to visit.
After living in Europe for a month, Inger decided to head to California to visit her grandmother and has surprisingly stayed put ever since. She enrolled in Yuba College and decided to try her hand at welding. That’s when she quickly fell in love with manipulating metal.
Throughout her adventures, Inger has had many jobs in food service industry and was drawn to Flavors. She thought Flavors had excellent food, but realized that not many people knew it was there. That is when she came up with the idea to make the restaurant a sign.
Inger is now working on a few projects for the Yuba County Library and is looking forward to creating a series of vintage lingerie pieces in metal. She will be graduating this semester from Yuba College, but will continue to create artwork for the community.
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