Photo of the Week

Last weekend, when I went to visit my crazy Aunt Helen at the Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital, I encountered an escaped mental patient in the parking lot. She was wearing a dress that appeared to be stitched together from latex gloves and a plastic bucket on her head as she slowly crawled toward me like some kind of human tarantula. As she drew closer, and as I pulled out my cell phone camera, I heard her singing inside her makeshift space helmet. The song was the Burt Bacharach classic "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" -- or something that sounded very much like it. It was hard to make out the lyrics, because her voice echoed so much inside the bucket. The whole thing gave me the creeps! When I reported her at the hospital's front desk, the receptionist said "not again" with an exasperated tone. I later saw some guys chasing the escapee around the parking lot with what looked like an enormous butterfly net.

Actually, I just made all that up. This is a photo I snapped at an art/performance event -- "Environment Investigation" -- by Shua Group, an avant-garde dance troop based in Jersey City. There were several female performers involved, all dressed similarly in latex-glove dresses. They did several things with buckets besides wearing them on their heads as they slowly moved in unison, picking up and dropping pieces of trash around a concrete skate-boarding pad on the edge of the city. The total effect was quite hypnotic. Click the pic (and another one from this event here) for a closer view and to be gob-smacked by the boundary-breaking cultural innovation of it all.