To Flash Mobs

Shopping malls. Parks. A Sunday afternoon at the lake. In the hotel lobby. The college’s student union. Someone starts singing alone, acapella, or music starts from a discreet boom box and a dancer breaks out. A small circle forms, creates the stage.

Another joins in. And another and another. You’re standing there and suddenly, the cousin you came with because she said you have such great taste in shoes and she wanted your opinion, she hops in and knows all the steps. Soon it seems more people are in on it than are observing and what seemed like an unusually busy day at the park becomes an event, a movement: kinetic, orchestrated and choreographed. Brief. Very 21st century.

By Ekolok (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Once you realize this is not just one or two people, that this is a thing, you hope it’s real. Finally, the universal fantasy that, as in a musical, we can suddenly burst into song and dance, that the people around us with either join us or enjoy us, that we can create a stage right where we are standing and that there is no fourth wall ever. Babies and dogs and the old lady stepping off the elevator are all one collective moment with a Bruno Mars soundtrack.

No one is mad. We have unexpectedly given up 5 minutes of our lives for a song. We are the same people that are impatient in the bank line, sneak 14 items into the “12 Items or Less” lane at the Albertson’s. We are the people that cut each other off on the highway. We microwaved our lunches earlier today and only just long enough to make the soup palpable. We text so we don’t have to  chit chat before we get to the real reason we called. We don’t have enough time to exercise and we study lists that say things like “10 Ways to Simplify Your Life” for the one thing that will actually work.

But we have suspended our lives, willingly. We saw it start and began to wonder: Is this….? What the…? What do I do here? And then it’s over. Applause. We are grateful. We had forgotten about art, about performance. And the mob invites us back. And it’s not our disbelief we suspend, it’s our belief that where we are going and what we are about to do matters more than this.