Frozen Food at Quincy Market
It was pretty cold in Boston February 23rd, 2008. Freezing even, when 60-70 people met near the bandstand at Government Center. The original plan was intended for a group of about 25 or so, but having more than doubled in size it was replaced with the backup contingency plan for just such a (fantastic) situation. With such a large group we kept the instructions simple and to the point:
Set your cell to silent (vibrate) alarm at 1:45pm. Set one more alarm for 1:50pm. Head to historic Quincy Market in the most touristy part of Boston for some eats. When the first alarm goes off freeze in place in whatever position you are in. When the second alarm goes off continue doing whatever it was you were doing before the freeze, then leave discreetly. We weren't alone in this either- similar groups in 10 other cities were carrying out similar freeze stunts on the same day and we were more than happy to join them.
We kept the event in the west half of this glorified food court- which was about to become a "frozen food" court. At 1:45 on the dot all 50+ Improveratti froze in unison. It didn't take long for people to notice! Some Improveratti froze reading the travel flyers that were being passed out at the entrance, some were frozen eating or sipping from their drinks, some were mid stride, someone taking off their jacket... people were creative with their poses but did nothing out of the ordinary that said "hey look at me- I'm striking a pose". Everyone did a great job of staying in character, which was increasingly difficult as the time slowly ticked on.
There were voices of excitement all around as people went from one frozen participant to the next. "Look at this one- oh look as these two!" people exclaimed getting right up in our faces to inspect our dedication to the freeze. A couple bystanders were unimpressed; "Is this some kind of protest?"; "Are they getting paid to do this? You couldn't PAY me to do this..." and a couple were freaked out- quite simply stating "This is freaking me out!".
Many people started taking photographs and some wanted their pictures taken posing next to the frozen people- seemingly not realizing everyone is going to look frozen in the photographs anyway! Still, somewhere out there floating around in many strangers' vacation photo albums will be a collection of non-remarkable photographs of BSOS Improveratti sipping sodas and taking off jackets behind enthusiastically smiling vacationers.
At 1:50 on the dot everyone followed through with their previously frozen action then casually left the building. All in all a very successful event with a lot of first timers who weren't afraid to make a spectacle of themselves. Great job everyone! We'll be getting a video together over the next week and we'll be posting it on our main site! Please share your experiences and comments below as well as links to any media you have uploaded!
I want to thank everyone for coming out and creating a Spectacle. We got a lot of great reactions- I had a lot of fun and really hope you guys did too. I'm looking forward to seeing many of you on our next event next month.
Murphy's Law was against me in getting this thing together. The server that hosts my email had a glitch and lost all my emails for the 2 days leading up to this- many important emails I was expecting for this event never arrived- sorry if I didn't respond to you!!! THEN the day of the event our site went COMPLETELY OFFLINE! Our site is hosted by a separate company than the email and they had a severe power outage that corrupted the site's database (that means your account info, the stories, calendar events- EVERYTHING) and the server's support lines were overwhelmed. I STILL haven't heard back from them 30 hours later. Then our main camera guys got misdirected in this weird freak wrong number issue.
But you guys were all awesome- despite a downed site you all showed up and many of you brought cameras and used your cell phones to record video and take pictures. I cant wait to get all your pics and videos so we can put them all together in a big montage. If you took anything you should email us at reports@bostonsos.org and we'll talk about getting it in our video (even if you think its poor quality- we want it!)
Special thanks go to Zachary (Agent SLATE) who recorded a ton of footage on his camera and did a number of post-Spectacle interviews. He even got the first video of the event up on YouTube- and its edited pretty well too! Fantastic job!
I had a hard time keeping a straight face but somehow I managed- even when one lady stuck her face just inches from mine. Moment of irony is just before freezing the people I was walking behind were having a lengthy conversation about the living statue performer just outside and how hard it must be to stay frozen like that for so long!
I was surprised how quickly people around us noticed we had frozen- it seemed almost instantaneous. It also seemed to go on for so long, yet I wish it could have lasted a bit longer.
Thanks again and see you all next time!
-James Cobalt
BSOS Man Guy Person
I listened to the half-hour or so of audio I recorded from the event, and while a lot of it was worthless static, I've got some choice clips I'll upload come the weekend when I have time to edit/produce them.
Highlights:
- Mission briefing
- "Maybe we should call the police!"
- "We're giving away 100 free vacations..."
I froze holding one of the pamphlets out to someone
Great job by everyone! I heard some really funny comments haha my favorite moment was most definitely when some girl walking by tried to steal a cookie right out of my mouth! (Yeah, I got stuck with a cookie hanging out of my mouth when we froze, it was unfortunate.) But I didn't let her have it! Also great job prepping and getting stuff ready, nice that we had a backup plan. Alsooo some of the photographers did awesome jobs (there are lots of videos on youtube already.)
Cheers to all of you!
---Agent Doogles---
When I was first counting down the seconds, I couldn't tell if there were alot of people in that part of the hall or not, so I rushed with my friend towards the rotunda area. I froze on my cell phone, and my friend froze drinking a bottle of water. At first I thought it would be impossible to hold that position for too long. A few people walked by and almost took me out, not even noticing I was standing there completely still. After a few minutes, my mouth got really dry, from being partially open while "talking" on my phone, but I tried my best not to flinch! I could see a group of people in front of me, and some diagonally, one was frozen taking a picture. I sure hope he was recording! One man walked by and told his son "did you notice what those people were doing?". Two asian girls came up to me speaking something foreign, and were looking around, completely confused. Just seeing them trying to figure it out was one of the best reactions I witnessed; arn't us Americans crazy? It ended up being a really fun day, especially since it was right after the MP3 experiment. I hope we have another one soon!
Hope I can make it.