Artistic license

Think there's a law against dressing up your wheels? Think again.

The Saab belonging to Rebecca Perlo of Arlington has over a thousand toys attached to it. (Essdras M Suarez/Globe Staff)

Rebecca Perlo's toy collection is simply overwhelming: Nemo, Simba, Fantastic Man, and "Evil" Homer Simpson action figures; Barney, Bugs Bunny, and Princess Leia Pez dispensers; Playskool people, Lego people, Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots, and Mr. Potato Head.

Throw in some yo-yos, a miniature slot machine and a rubber ducky or two, and lots of other stuff, and the number of toys in Perlo's menagerie hits 1,000, maybe even 1,500. Where does she keep them all? Glued to the hood, roof, doors and fenders of her 1999 Saab.

Perlo and her husband, Doug, boast the wildest "art car" in all of Boston - a veritable toy store on wheels. It goes wherever Perlo goes - the Fresh Pond Whole Foods, her boys' elementary school on Concord Avenue, the parking lot at Lahey Clinic in Burlington, where Perlo works as a physician's assistant.

"It's all I've got," says Perlo about the car she's driven for nearly 10 years, even through New England winters.

How does Perlo get away with driving her toy-spackled contraption on our roads? She winks. "I've got friends at the inspection station," she says.

Actually, the craziest thing about Perlo's car might be that it's completely street-legal. According to state law, you can glue pretty much whatever you want to your ride - toys, pots and pans, living grass - and still pass inspection.

"As long as she doesn't obstruct the lighting and her visibility, there's no violation," said Lieutenant Jack Albert, head of the Cambridge Police Department's traffic division, who's seen Perlo driving around town.

Last week's column looked at an assortment of items one can strap onto a car, from mattresses to Christmas trees. But what about physically transforming your vehicle into, well, a work of art?

Bill Turville attached a gigantic metal tail and fish head to his car for a Somerville arts festival. Roslindale's Karl Haakonsen parades his mosaic-covered Rozzie Car around his neighborhood, with hopes of erecting a three-dimensional model of Roslindale Square on its roof by spring.

Avon resident Howard Davis spent the summer driving his telephone-shaped car across the country, a la the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile - probably the nation's most easily recognizable art car.

"There are two reactions to art cars," says Cambridge's Jesse Gordon, who runs a website called Art Cars of New England. "One is, 'How dare you desecrate something so valuable?' Once you have an art car, it really has no resale value. The other reaction is, people think it's a blast. We're the antidote to road rage."

Boston's art car scene is, alas, a tame one compared with other parts of the country - Nevada's Burning Man festival traditionally features an art car parade, for example, while Houston has an entire museum dedicated to them. Turville's eye-popping Fish Car, which he created while working as an artist in Somerville, isn't even street legal, as the fish head blocks a good portion of his windshield. (He can only drive it in parades.)

But if you've got imagination, the law grants a surprising amount of leeway.

Your car's safety features can't be altered, and as Albert says, you must keep your lighting systems and windshield clear. You can't expand the width of your vehicle beyond 8 1/2 feet, but you can go as high as 13 1/2 feet. Your artwork - say, fish fins - can extend three feet beyond the front of the car and four feet beyond the trunk. Adhere to these guidelines, and you're on your way.

The discount retailer Marshalls, for example, has purchased an 8-foot tall, 500-pound red stiletto, mounted on the chassis of a motorcycle, as a promotional gimmick. Last month, the shoe motored along Boylston and Newbury streets in the Back Bay, Washington Street downtown, and around Somerville's Davis Square, no more illegal than the car you drive.

Turville built his Fish Car eight years ago at his old Somerville studio, attaching sheet metal fins and the fish head to the body of a 1999 Dodge Omni, all financed by a $1,500 art grant.

"The theme of the Art Beat Festival that year was the Mystic River. I realized there are far more cars in the Mystic River than fish on the streets of Somerville, so I put a fish on the road," he says. The car, aside from delighting children, served the higher purpose of raising people's awareness of river pollution.

Haakonsen got into art cars in an entirely different way. He was divorced, broke, and driving his 1989 Mazda pickup truck to Montreal every month to see his daughter. When he moved closer to work to save money on gas, his job was promptly moved 25 miles away.

"I was being forced to drive everywhere, so I was angry at the car culture," he says. "The Roslindale Day Parade was coming up and they were looking for someone to loan them a car for a float. I said, 'How about we just take my truck and get all the artists together and paint it?' "

He's now on art car No. 2, a 1993 Saturn that his daughter and second wife have helped paint.

Then there are the Perlos, who created their art car for the sheer fun of it. "It was something I always wanted to do," says Rebecca. "I love toys."

Perlo assembled her first art car while living on Western Avenue in Cambridge. It was a scaled-down version that, unfortunately, was regularly vandalized. A few years later, she and her husband moved to Arlington and bought a new 1999 Saab. They sanded off the clear coat, splattered it with a rainbow of paint, recoated it, and, when it had dried, went insane with the silicone gun, gluing on hundreds of tiny toys and magnets.

"I deliberately got this kind of car because I thought that if I'm going to spend this much time and energy on it, I want it to last," Rebecca says. "Some people have the opposite view - I wouldn't do that to a car until it's on death's door. I'm like, why bother then?"

Scan the car's paneling and you'll stumble across everything from Where the Wild Things Are plastic toys to cellphone covers to toy airplanes, plastic ladybugs (and cockroaches!), alligators, skeletons, Ewoks, and CDs.

The rooftop is so thickly covered you can't see the paint, and every so often, you'll strike upon a theme: an entire Playskool operating room, Mulder and Scully chasing an alien, four frogs crawling in a line, progressing from tadpole stage to adult.

Friends, neighbors, and the Perlos' sons, Noah and Zach, have all added to the mix. "My kids are like, 'Mommy, I'm done with this toy. Can I glue it to the car now?" Perlo says.

Which is a good thing, because the ornaments don't last forever. Some, like an old Mickey Mouse, are weathered gray. Though they say nothing's fallen off on the highway yet, vandalism is a constant problem - a recent nighttime trip to Central Square saw the demise of a giant Charlie Brown Pez dispenser, as well as Doug Perlo's favorite decoration, a 1920s French radiator cap shaped like a silver goddess.

"Another thing I really liked that's not there anymore is this Buddha we had with a propeller in its belly, like a beanie-cap propeller," says Perlo, a Boston lawyer. "One of the first times I drove the car I heard this whirling sound - I thought something was wrong with the transmission. . . . It took me a while to figure out it was the Buddha."

The Perlos don't seem to mind that their car, which they've nicknamed the Meowww Car, is ever-changing, though. And while the attention the car gets is sometimes overwhelming - admirers constantly leave letters and toys of their own on the windshield - the Perlos wouldn't want it any other way.

"I hope to be driving it until we drive the kids to college," says Rebecca Perlo. "I've had cops pull me over just to take a picture with the car. I've also been let into places where they're supposed to charge you, but they're like, 'Thanks ma'am. You made my day.' That is pretty cool."

Peter DeMarco can be reached at demarco@globe.com.