Stumble It!
There was a time when we rolled with a chronically bohemian crowd. These are the folks who drink black coffee at midnight in all-night cafes discussing Sondheim and/or anal sex. They live for the Whitney Biennial so they can scowl at the latest Matthew Barney sculpture of Vaseline and peanut butter. They attend Fassbinder retrospectives at the Quad Cinema and pretend to "get it." They write in their journals on the L Train and light up joints at poetry slams. And thus begins yet another tale from our retarded past.
Today, if someone invited us to make a plaster and mud helmet, don a loin cloth and prance through the streets of Manhattan we'd smile, pay the check and hail a cab. But somehow, in 1989 when a friend suggested we do that very thing, it sounded like a good idea. Three or four dozen of us sensitive artistes gathered the night before in an enormous loft on Bond Street. It belonged to a woman whose hair was so long she was always sitting on it and saying "ouch." She smoked clove cigarettes and, Liza-like, pronounced her "esses" with an "sh." When she answered the door she said "I'm sho glad you came, shweetie. Make yourshelf at home, we have shoda and shnaksh." That night, we all made our mud-masks. Some masks were happy. Some were scary. Others, like ours, were simply odd. If Charlie Brown wore ours on Halloween, he'd end up with a sack of rocks.
The next morning, we met in an alley somewhere off the Bowery. We slathered mud on our now-hardened masks (they had somehow procured about a dozen plastic tubs of goopy mud). Then we stripped down, put on loin cloths (the gals went topless, God bless 'em), smeared our bodies with mud, and commenced to terrorize the city en masse while beating sticks together.
This was organized by a long-since-defunct group called "The Denver Mudmen" who would do this sort of thing several times a year in cities all over the world. The idea was to introduce an unexpected jolt of primitive paganism to the urban-dweller's detached, routine lives. That day, we marched to Washington Square Park to worship the fountain. Then we headed to Soho, formed a circle in front of an art gallery and paid homage to a fire hydrant. Next, our surreal parade skipped and pranced up Broadway. Along the way, we gang-worshiped a bewildered hot dog vendor and danced around an uneasy bike messenger. We ended up at Astor Place, working ourselves into a frenzy while spinning the cube in front of the Cooper Union (New Yorkers know whereof we speak; there's a huge cube sculpture that can be rotated with some effort, usually by drunk NYU students at 4 a.m.).
We learned a few things that day. First, New Yorkers (not typically predisposed to yield to other pedestrians) are more than happy to provide a generous berth to 40-odd marauding naked mud-monsters. Second, police are ill-trained to deal with a sudden invasion of loin clothed hydrant worshipers; we terrified them and they left us alone. Third, although the organizers told us this would happen (and we reacted with skepticism), by the time we'd reached the cube-spinning finale we were astonished to find hundreds of New Yorkers had joined us (some carrying brief cases, others pushing strollers), blissfully chanting and worshiping along with us.
Finally, if you ever decide to smear your entire body in mud, for weeks afterward you'll find mud in the strangest places.
COWA subscribers do it in the mud.
