Walking on the moon

It's taken a week for the whole thing to go up online elsewhere, so I've been waiting, but this is what I was up to last Sunday afternoon: The MP3 experiment 2.0, brought to all of us by ImprovEverywhere.

Absolutely surreally incredible. Once alerted to the event, all you had to do was download an mp3, not listen to it, then bring it with you on an iPod or a CD you'd burned to Sheep's Meadow in Central Park. At or near 3pm, a man would walk to the center of the field with a bullhorn and announce "one minute," and then he counted down with a few seconds to go. At that time, you were to start the mp3 and do what it said. And what it said, among other things, was to stand and wave at all your new friends, wave up at the sky at "Steve," walk like a zombie, bust a move, and then everyone was divided into four groups who all followed a new "leader." Our leader was an astronaut, who had us walk on the moon and plant American flags. (That's me in the picture above, in the red jacket. We're moon walking. I look larger than expected, which I suppose is, conversely, expected.) Anyway, then all four groups faced off in a rock-paper-scissors competition (the bees won) and we were all "Graduated" by being given small blowup beach balls, which we triumphantly tossed in the air. In the middle of all of this, anyone in Sheeps Meadow who didn't have the mp3 was wonderfully, baffingly, amused at seeing 200 or so people zombie walk across the grass. I can only imagine what they thought. As we all dispersed to Bethesda Fountain to the tune of "Saturday in the Park" by Chicago, it was impossible to get rid of the totally silly grin on your face. A marvelous effort. And so very, very New York.

Since then I've been a little busy but have encountered: An assumed (but not verified) man on stilts, walking down Broadway around 6pm on Wednesday evening. No circus spotted nearby, no reason for him to be there, yet, voila. Later in the week, a woman all in white danced in a religious frenzy throughout a mostly-empty subway car on the way home. In one direction she didn't say anything; the second time around she was muttering words for Jesus.

This place does keep you hopping.

Addendum: There's another mp3 experiment on October 26. Info here.