Stickin' It to the Man

Every so often, I come across a group of people who make me proud to be a human. My friend Alex told me about this site. It features this organization (in the loosest sense of the word) named "Improv Everywhere." Apparently, they gather small groups of people and perform guerilla improv in highly inappropriate places.

On this one, they got 80 people to dress up in blue shirts and khaki pants. These people then wandered into a Best Buy store, where they wandered around randomly helping strangers. This, of course, completely wigged out the store staff, who were convinced that the group was planning a heist, a la The Thomas Crown Affair, protesting something or other, or showing their allegiance to a religious cult.


What really interests me is the incredibly negative spin that the Best Buy management put on the whole thing. Granted, this store was located in New York City, and store managers in urban centers can benefit from a little paranoia. However, the managers' inability to look beyond their narrow conclustions, even when it became clear that the improv people were there to have fun, ended up creating some real problems. There's a point where paranoia becomes its own punishment, and these pinheads seemed to tromp right past that line.

On this one, they synchronized the ringers on a whole bunch of phones, turned them in to the bag check at the Strand, a huge bookstore in New York, and then proceeded to call the phones in certain patterns. Ultimately, it yielded a cellphone "symphony" that amused many of the employees and customers, but caused a manager to go ballistic.

I think that what I love about this group is the beauty that they bring into the world, combined with the fact that this beauty, in turn, becomes a Rohrshak test for its audience.