preliminary experiments in public foolery
[a 'serious' photo of Tina, Enna and I wearing mostly black outfits with juggling scarves around our necks or in Tina's case, on her hat. Our hair is frizzed and we hold goofy suitcases. We look directly at the camera]
On monday two of my buddies from summer school (Tina, Enna) and I decided to hit the streets and experiment with making fools of ourselves in public. Our only goal was to make someone's day a little more interesting than it was before, and our only real plan was to play. We didn't want to feel nervous or pressured, so we just treated this as an opportunity to collect data about how people react to unusual behavior in public, and how it feels to be looked at in different ways.
We tried on a lot of different things - walking (/wheeling) with serious world-saving purpose, playing with horns, toys, and plastic forks, inspecting the train, but we quickly discovered that strangers were most responsive to us when we kept our distance, kept it simple, and kept things positive. We held doors for people, rode escalators, and observed our surroundings with awe and amazement. We spent a good amount of time greeting people with extreme and silent enthusiasm from across the train platform, which was hilariously successful. I was surprised and relieved that nobody gave us a hard time or a bad attitude - we were very politely asked to leave a private office building (which we complied with), but other than that folks were quietly receptive and sometimes even playful with us. My favorite moments were when some tired-looking person would notice us waving and would look around all bewildered, trying to figure out who we were so excited about. Then they'd kind of point to themself like 'do you really mean me?' and we'd nod and smile and blow kisses and give them thumbs up and they'd look laugh and look quite flattered.
Getting out of costume and going home was an unexpectedly fascinating aspect of the day as well - transitioning back into the public performance of 'ordinary' was such a trip!
