Hello gorgeous, I'm Mandi Loomis.

I paint ladies in weird colors and teach robots to do paperwork.

I'm the artist, author, and slightly inappropriate mastermind behind Champagne Fabulous®, where bold color, tech nerd, cheeky humor, and an obsession with glamour all live together like a very stylish little squad.

If you've been around here lately, you probably already know about the paintings, the products, the books I'm writing, and my ongoing emotional entanglement with very helpful robot interns. What you may not know is the origin story. Many people have said I should write a book about my life, and maybe someday I will, but for now here are the highlights.

In looking back, it's like a soap opera, a business conference, a paintbrush, a blues bar, and a software manual all got drunk together and made a baby.

Previously on Mandi's Life...

I have always been a ham.

There are home movies of me dancing at a family reunion in my Pappaw's hat while I was still in diapers. I sang my first solo in church when I was four years old, which seems like an insane amount of confidence for someone who couldn't write their own name yet.

That appetite for a stage never really left. I got a degree in Theatre, moved to Chicago, became a blues singer (a very meaningful chapter of my life I spent absolutely convinced I was one dramatic outfit away from rock star greatness). I mean, I had the hair, the feelings, and the commitment to a smoky eye.

Then life leaned over and said, “Um, but how exactly are we paying for groceries?”

It turned out that a whole lot of extremely talented working musicians were out there scraping by, and while I love the thrill of the spotlight, I also love buying lots of shoes and totally needed health insurance. And trying to keep a band together is like trying to be married to five people at the same time. AND sometimes on a Friday night when you have PMS you just want to lay on the couch, not put on a feather boa. So through a string of events that only makes sense when you look back on it with a cocktail in hand, instead of a rock star, I became a software goddess.

The girl who hates math became a computer nerd

For 21 years, I was a workaholic for a hotel sales software company. The first few years I was a trainer. Every week I flew to a hotel somewhere that had bought our program, and trained them how to use it. This is how I earned the nickname Jet Set Barbie. The thing about hotel salespeople is that they would much rather be out playing golf or taking their customers out for cocktails than sitting at their desk using their computer. So I used my love of Saturday Night Live and stage skills to make boring computer stuff fun.

My biggest reward was when they would say, "Oh my god I thought this computer training was going to be boring but it was actually fun and I learned a lot." Not to brag but that happened almost every week.

For the next two decades I went deeper and deeper into nerd town. I became a consultant where I would figure out how to customize the software for exactly what each hotel needed. I wrote help content, built e-learning courses, certification programs, and presented sessions at our annual conferences. The last few years I was a product manager where I actually decided what the next version of the software was going to do.

All of those jobs that I did involved watching what people were doing every day, figuring out what was repetitive or could be automated or systemized, and getting the software to make their daily lives easier. And then explaining to people who don't like computers how to use it. Someone told me once that my spiritual gift was translating nerd to normal people. Oh hell yes! Ding ding ding! I wanted to put that on my business card.

Enter art

The first painting class I attended was in 2017 when I was 46 years old. I was working for the software company and was tired of traveling so I transferred to a complete work-from-home job.

I had also just gotten married, moved to a new town, didn't know anybody, and needed friends before I started assigning personalities to the throw pillows.

My real estate agent invited me to one of those wine-and-paint nights and I thought, "Well, I don't completely suck at this and I really enjoyed it." So I googled "painting lessons Longview," signed up, and that was all she wrote.

I've always been creative. I've always loved making things. I was a craft-project make a wreath girl. A costume girl. A glitter-and-glue-and-why-is-there-feather-trim-on-the-dining-table girl. But I did not grow up thinking I was one of those people who could draw and paint for real. That seemed like a mysterious gift bestowed only upon chosen people in excellent scarves.

Turns out, if you get sucked in and practice enough, you can probably do pretty much anything. And boy, did I get sucked in. I took every art class that I could find and did tons of YouTube tutorials.

Nine years later, art is not a side quest. It's my business, my obsession, my therapy, and one of the greatest joys I've ever stumbled into by accident. It has also introduced me to the MOST amazing friends.

The crossover episode

For the longest time, I thought I had two completely separate identities.

There was Art Mandi, who wanted to make beautiful things, hang out with creative people, and buy art supplies with the intensity of a Doomsday Prepper.

And then there was Corporate Computer Mandi, who could dig through software like a raccoon with a PhD, figure out what it was supposed to do, and make it behave.

Different worlds. Different outfits. Different theme music.

Or so I thought.

But in the past few years I have realized that the things that I was doing for hotel salespeople I could also do for artists because selling something is selling something.

My scandalous love affair with Hot Intern Bot™

And now we arrive at present day.

Lately, I have been deep in a torrid affair with a Hot Intern Bot, which is what I call my AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT. So obsessed that I'm writing a book about it.

In February of this year (2026) I started using Claude Co-work. And let me tell you something: this has blown my skirt clean over my head.

I feel like we're on the verge of becoming the Jetsons. The first time I ever felt like "Oh my god, this is the Jetsons" was when I had my first FaceTime call on my iPhone. The things that I am able to do with Claude Co-Work make me feel like the world is changing in front of my face.

Just by talking to Claude I am developing systems that are going to do all of the computer stuff that is required to run an art business. That is going to give me so much more time to actually paint. And I cannot believe how fast and easy it is to do what I used to spend months working on as a product manager at the software company. I'd figure out what something needed to do, hand over the concept, see what came back, say yes to this, no to that, make it prettier, make it smarter, tell it to stop acting weird, and keep going until it actually solved the real problem.

That is exactly what I've been doing lately with AI, except now the loop is so fast it feels mildly scandalous.

I tell Claude what I want it to do and ask it if it's possible for it to do that for me, wait a few minutes while it thinks about it and immediately am able to test it out. In a matter of days, I've been able to build art workflow systems I can literally package up and share with friends so we can all have an easier, smarter, more delightful time being artists.

And that has made one thing crystal clear to me:

If you can think clearly and explain what you want, you can build almost anything now.

Not in some distant shiny future where everybody wears silver jumpsuits and eats a pill for lunch.

Right now.

You do not have to work for some giant software company with a boss named Brad and a sad conference room muffin budget. You can sit down with your Hot Intern Bot, have a bossy little conversation, and end up with something useful that saves real time and fixes real headaches.

That is a huge shift. Like, life-changing. As my college roommates used to say when I was taking off my bra, "Grab something nailed down because the gravitational pull of the earth is about to shift!"

And I am very, very into it.

Building my dream life

Here's how I am trying to live my life these days.

Making bold, glamorous art.

Creating products with my art on them that do not look like everybody else's.

Figuring out how much of my adulting I can turn over to my Hot Intern Bot, and sharing that with people who are sick of doing repetitive bullshit.

Because you are too fab to spend your best years manually retyping nonsense, drowning in tabs, and acting like paperwork deserves this much of your precious life force.

My Krystle Carrington fantasy future plotline

Here's my dream sequence of how I envision the future.

A fabulous kaftan commune.

A giant shared studio in the middle. Tiny houses around it. Me and my artist friends nearby, laughing, painting, building cool things, eating snacks that feel rich, wearing flowy garments, and minding our business in the chicest possible way.

And while all of that is happening, our little team of intern robots is in the background handling the admin, the forms, the sorting, the repetitive tasks, and all the other nonsense that has never once made a person feel alive.

And frankly, I think it has legs.

The real point, before I wander off and buy more art supplies

Life is short.

Time is not guaranteed.

Watching my parents age has only made that feel more real.

So no, I am not interested in spending my one beautiful life buried under busywork, waiting for some magical later when I finally permit myself to enjoy it. I want to make things, build things, solve interesting problems, laugh with people I love, and create a life that actually feels like mine while I'm still here to wear the outfit and order the cocktail.

That's what all of this is about.

So whether you found me because of the art, the Hot Intern Bot world, the Fancy Business Lady situation, or just because you enjoy a woman with strong opinions and a ridiculous outfit, I'm very glad you're here.

Because fitting in is not a win.

And the best time to start is whenever the hell you want.

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