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PERFORMANCE?
Boston’s camera-flash mob
BY CAMILLE DODERO

The television crews were on the scene before the mobsters. Last Thursday around 7 p.m., a handful of powdered news correspondents, along with a couple of Cambridge cops, assembled near the Coop’s alley-side door in Harvard Square. The news story wasn’t scheduled to take place for at least another 10 minutes. But the reporters, some towing cameramen, killed time by watching people enter the Coop, like hungry buzzards eyeing a wheezing pack of possums.

The media were there to document Boston’s first "flash mob," an Internet-engineered synchrony of strangers congregating in public spaces for short, specific periods of time and collectively executing random acts like spinning in circles (San Francisco), cawing like birds (Central Park West), or rigidly stomping around like robots (the Mall of America). In Boston, the chosen "mob scene" was the Coop’s second-floor greeting-card section. The timeframe was 7:13 to 7:21 p.m. And the behavioral directive was "to be eerily quiet." If anyone asked why the 100 or so folks hugging the Hallmarks were there, participants were instructed to respond vaguely — something along the lines of "Looking for a card for my friend," "His name is Bill," or "He’s in New York."

At least, that’s what the instructions handed out 20 minutes before the event said. Sorted by their birth months, prospective mobsters knew from the Web to find one of five sites — exact spots like the Border Café (by the main bar), Daedalus (near the brick wall opposite the front door), or Au Bon Pain (the window table nearest the bathroom) — so they could learn the location of the imminent mob. But for the last month, the press has been all over this worldwide "phenomenon" like rats on raw sewage, so when the overeager beavers at the Boston Globe printed the date and place of the city’s first "flash mob" the previous Friday, it naturally followed that a lumpy cameraman, with a Fox logo on the nape of his T-shirt and a Channel 5 sticker on his equipment, would be the only sign that January and July mobster babies were in the right place at Au Bon Pain.

You can wax analytical about the flash-mob fad all you like — it’s public performance art; it’s a social phenomenon; it’s a "post-political" movement, as the organizer of the Mall of America event theorized on www.fimoculous.com. But in Cambridge, the occasion was more representative of Marshall McLuhanism than anything else. Not only had the Globe effectively nullified the potential for surprise — which, supposedly, was the original intent behind the "flash mob" — but when people clambered up the escalators of the Coop and invaded the greeting-card section to the left, the flashbulbs popped immediately. Then everybody crammed into the aisles for a few minutes, mumbling and talking until someone shushed the crowd. Someone else started whistling "Happy Birthday," likely in honor of the card for the mob’s imaginary friend, Bill. Soon after, people clapped and trickled out. In the end, the eight-minute exposition didn’t seem sneaky or odd. Instead, it seemed like a recital for the evening news.

Later that night, flash mobster Brad Searles posted screen shots from WCVB’s 11 o’clock newscast on his Boston-area blog (www.bradleysalmanac.com) — according to his stills, Channel 5 field correspondent Christina McKenna was still stationed in Harvard Square four hours later — and wrote his own take on the episode. At one point, he says, "I asked the confused sales clerk at the counter, ‘What’s the deal with all the people, anyway?’ His explanation? ‘I dunno ... some Channel 4 thing.’"


Issue Date: August 8 - 14, 2003
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