Mostly taken on Friday, 8/10/2012 at the northern end of Flatiron Plaza.
Performance art, audience, and miscellaneous passer-bys and tourists.
The principal performer is Rebecca Macintosh, an Australian playing the role of Aphrodite. She is inviting and she also invites people from the audience into her den, a trailer with a big picture window, decorated to look like a giant sized, sea-shell bedecked talk-show tv studio. Once inside, she interviews her guests about their love lives and such.
I wandered by on Thursday afternoon when she and her crew were setting up for their performances on that evening and the following. She told me she had a grant from the Department of Transportation to put on shows throughout the month of August in all five boroughs. She was launching in Manhattan, and would visit the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. Everywhere she'd go, the show would be the same but like a talk show, every night would be different.
She was more than ably assisted by Dr. Love - that's the fellow with the white lab coat, pink tee-shirt and blue shorts, the spiral man and the bubble man. Her producer, Victoria Johnson - that's the lady in the red dress - signed up the victims and led the cheers. There were others around to lend a hand and document.
Anyone who knows me knows I'm not only interested in documenting the show, but also the audience and the generality of pedestrian traffic moving through the area. Madison Square is not Times Square in terms of crowds, and I'll take that as a positive, but it is no desert, either. There are plenty of tourists who wander into the district but not so many as to leave the locals feeling overwhelmed.
Anyway, for now, here's a whole bunch of pictures. Among them is a couple who met at one of their parent's home. The one was married to the other's man's sister but once they met, sparks flew, lightning struck and that was one more marriage on the rocks and another one eventually to happen. Then there's the young professional couple who met at Yale, went out, didn't go out and then went out again, and now are happy and married. A regular "When Harry Met Sally" story. And there's the radical dominatrix who wants to change the world, not by making everyone either dominant or submissive, though that might be another fair dichotomy to describe people, but by cutting back on wastel, on fuel consumption, and on general evil. And so on.
