Tag, you're it!
Playing pranks with the Boston Society of Spontaneity
On a sunny Sunday afternoon in August, some 40 young Bostonians have congregated at the top of the steps behind Government Center. None of us knows why we're here. We know only that we were supposed to get here by 2 p.m. Some wait quietly. (A skinny kid sits hunched on a bench, reading his "Introductory Linear Circuits and Electronics" textbook.) Others try to guess what's going on. ("We're going to Mayor Menino's office, and we're stripping for him," a man tells the woman standing next to him. "So get your hips ready.")
At 2:05, a skinny guy in a beard and Polo shorts steps to the front of the group with a megaphone. James
"Our only agenda is to make people smile," says the 20-something Cobalt. "Boston is a great city, but it's not one of the most exciting cities, and it's definitely not one of the friendliest cities. We're trying to save Boston from itself."
Using the megaphone, Cobalt tells us we'll be performing two spectacles, beginning with a slow-motion shopping spree in Quincy Market. "Everything we're going to do will be reaaaaaaally slow," Cobalt says.
We head down Hanover Street, to Union, then through Quincy Market until we reach the prescribed spot - a circle near the outdoor kiosks by the South Market. At 2:15, the prescribed time,
everyone starts shopping slowly.
Most of the slo-mo shopping entails inspecting cheap jewelry and T-shirts in a sluggish manner, but a few folks turn it up a notch. Two SOS members crash into each other and fall down in slow motion, which garners some smiles from onlookers. Another guy wields a sign that says, "Free Hugs." Some tourists take him up on the offer and leave looking a little disturbed after he hugs them in slo-mo. Generally, though, as urban pranks go, this one is too subtle. Because Quincy Market is replete with buskers, it's easy for outsiders to assume we're just another group of street performers. Sunday shoppers tend to move pretty slowly anyway, so a lot of people don't even notice that anything's amiss.
Boston SOS is based on Improv Everywhere, a New York-based organization best known for spearheading the "No Pants! Subway Ride," and the shopping stunt pays homage to a classic Improv Everywhere stunt in which 225 New Yorkers showed up at a
At 2:30 we reconvene behind Government Center and await our next spectacle. We're going to play a game of tag with unsuspecting passersby. By this time our group has grown to almost 50 pranksters. Cobalt explains that everyone will mill around casually until the person who is "it" tags an unsuspecting passerby and yells, "Tag, you're it!" At that point, the rest of the players will run away from the confused stranger.
"Try not to scream while you're running away," Cobalt tells us. "That scares people. Just say, 'Oohh, she's it!' or something like that."
It turns out Cobalt and crew seriously frightened someone the last time they played tag, a few months prior. Upon observing a crowd of fleeing screamers, a man assumed a terrorist attack and hit the deck.
"There's so much paranoia," Cobalt says. "That's one of the biggest differences between Boston and New York. People in Boston are so much more paranoid, which is ironic because New York was the city that was attacked on 9/11."
For today's game, Cobalt deliberately seeks out "a non-scary person" to be the first tagger. He picks Ellen Higger, a petite Emerson student with a cute shaggy haircut and an air of languid serenity that belies her speed.
Cobalt has been surprised by the different kinds of people who have joined the group. "I thought it would be all college kids and high school kids - that they'd all be extremely liberal and in the drama club," Cobalt says. "But the political spectrum is vast. We have some right wing conservative people in the group, and we have people who are older than 60."
Higger sneaks up on her first target with a slow jog and a lunge: "Tag! You're it!" The first several passersby react to the game by ignoring it, even though a few of us have forgotten not to scream when running away. Many of the tagged strangers just look confused. ("I tagged a lot of people who didn't speak English," Higger explains later.)
At one point, an angry, disheveled man stomps by, ranting at the similarly unkempt man who is following him, quiet and dogged, 10 paces behind. The first man's voice carries through the plaza. "Get the [expletive] out of my [expletive] face! Get the [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] out of my [expletive] face!"
"Uh, don't tag that guy," Cobalt says.
At another point, a cop approaches one of the pranksters and demands to know what's going on, pointing at the myriad security cameras atop City Hall, which apparently have been recording us the whole time. (According to the prankster, when the cop picked up his phone to report back to another officer, his side of the conversation went something like this: "They're playing tag. Yeah. Stop laughing."')
The game picks up when Higger tags a woman in a sun hat, who shrugs and immediately tags her husband. "Don't tag me," he says. But he plays along, tagging a prankster "it" before he and his wife walk away, grinning. Two families of passersby follow suit, tagging each other before chasing the Boston SOS members.
Brad and Claudia Thomas, a middle-aged couple from Eugene, Ore., seem tickled by their inadvertent participation in the game of tag.
"To begin with, I thought he was going to ask for some spare change," Brad says of the young man who tagged him. "All of a sudden he tagged me!"
"We just came from an old bar, Bell in Hand, and they gave me a little bit of a stiff drink, and I'm feeling pretty good," his wife says. "That's why I couldn't run that fast."
Were they scared? "No!" Brad says, laughing. "Boston is too friendly a city to be scary." Or so it would seem. 