[LEMONS]
4.03.2006
Bad Ideas
NOTE: I DIDN'T MAKE THESE. I DON'T KNOW WHO MADE THESE. THEY'RE ALL OVER MY NEIGHBORHOOD. I JUST TOOK THE PICTURE.
Can these be legal? These stickers seem like an extremely bad idea. So, naturally, I've been seeing them all over the Haight lately. I don't know who posted them or what they're about, nor am I about to call the number and find out. I heard there were similar posters all over Brooklyn last year. Still. You would expect the Secret Service to have a conniption fit over this. It reminds me of something I heard once, and have taken as my own ever since: San Francisco is the kind of place where no one will tell you when you have a bad idea.
I've forgotten where I heard this first. Who said it? I'm not sure. But I think there's a lot of truth in it.
Hey man, I'm going to advertise my new play in such a way that it will get me investigated by the Secret Service and possibly thrown in jail.
Oh yeah? Right on!
When I see stuff like this, it always makes me think of Montgomery, Alabama, where I grew up. I remember my senior year in high school, some sort of pseudo hippie store with vaguely Wiccan overtones opened up. Vaguely Wiccan by Alabama standards, that is. I think they sold incense and patchouli. I doubt it would even been noticed just across the border in Georgia.
But when it opened in Old Cloverdale, (or near there, I forget exactly, this was 1990 or 1991) the store owners put flyers around town advertising their Balinese sarongs, Baja hoodies and plethora of patchouli. I don't remember much about the flyers, other than that they used a pentagram as a design element.
Big mistake.
The flyers caused quite a stir. Much gossip ensued. There was an article in the paper. The police investigated. There are Satanists in our midst, Montgomery!
Naturally, after seeing the hullabaloo I stopped by the store. It turned out I had just missed our notoriously fascist mayor (Who liked to play dress-up and parade around town in a SWAT team uniform) and a bevy of law enforcement officers. The store owner was still visibly shaken, and pissed that this was happening. Apparently the mayor had expressed his intention to have the store shut down. No more patchouli for you!
I had little sympathy: It's Alabama, dude. What did you expect?
Not that I didn't think the city was in the wrong. And I also felt the entire argument was misguided. The debate was entirely over whether the symbol was Satanic or not, and whether or not the store owners were Satanists. At no point was it about freedom of religion. It just went without saying that in Alabama in the 1990s you were not free to practice and express your own religion. Community standards were going to be upheld there no matter what. You couldn't just put something outrageous on a flyer and paper it all over town. It wouldn't be tolerated. Which brings me back around to the stickers.
Another truism I took to heart was something I read in the San Francisco Examiner, back when it was Hearst-owned, as I waited for a BART train to take me from the Fruitvale station in the East Bay over to San Francisco. There was an article about some sort of something or another happening in Alabama which, though it seemed perfectly understandable to me, apparently had the good citizens of this city perplexed. Attempting to explain, the paper made a sweeping statement noting "Alabama is the opposite of San Francisco." It's an over-generalization to be sure. Yet it's also perfectly true. People think very differently.
And so when I see those stickers (which I find it hard to believe are even tolerated here) they make me think of the Montgomery of my youth, and wonder what in the world would have happened to the poor fool that had the nerve to put them up--much less to put on a play with that title. My guess is that it would have been an extremely limited engagement.
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