By Andrew Rose and Jennifer O’Connell

A joint breakdown of a flashmob by two of Rookerville’s finest, Andrew Rose and Jennifer O’Connell.  You’ll find Andrew’s responses in Black and Jennifer’s in Blue.  Enjoy.

The first time I ever stepped foot in San Francisco, my weeklong vacation just so happened to overlap with Halloween, which, that year, just so happened to fall on a Saturday. I was out west doing the tourist thing – heading out to Alcatraz, taking a side trip to wine country, walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, etc. – but mostly I was visiting a good friend who I hadn’t seen since the twilight of college. Leading up to the 31st, I asked her if she had any potential plans for us (I had, in fact, packed a costume in my luggage), to which she explained that there was a secret email thread she had been subscribed to that would detail the whereabouts of guerrilla dance parties situated at the end of piers and other random, out-of-the-way locations. The point of these mobile, public celebrations was to “take back Halloween for the city”, or, for the more mischievous participants, get wild all night devoid of police interference.

I was skeptical at first that there was an online entity capable of organizing all this, as these were the days before Occupy Wall Street and other social media-initiated public events. But as it turns out, the fine citizens of San Francisco are quite fond of their free, internet-fueled social goings-on – citywide pillow fights, pub crawls, and most importantly, flashmobs. During this very same Halloween planning, my friend revealed she was also subscribed to an email list that provided her with dates, locations, and tutorials for the choreographed dances that broke out at random throughout the city. In the few years since then, these have become more organized, spawning a website and even scheduled group rehearsal times leading up to the big events. Of course, there are freelance flashmob planners as well, one of whom is the very same friend that first introduced me to the concept.

The day after Whitney Houston’s death, I woke up on a couch in Tahoe thinking, someone needs to throw a flashmob in her honor.  Who could DO that? A month later, I found myself on a street corner in the Castro with 1,000 other people busting a move to “Dance With Somebody.”  It had taken a youtube instructional video, my friends’ mega-speakers, a well-timed biopsy, and a website called funcheap.com to generate this much enthusiasm.  We took the street, closing down the intersection for 4 minutes and 53 seconds.  After the dancers had dissipated, a woman from a rougher part of town approached us.  She told us about how she had gathered all of the young girls from her neighborhood and brought them to the flashmob so they could feel what it was like to dance in the street with no fear.  I cried.  I was hooked.

The Macklemob started as one of my half-baked ideas to empower kids and spread mass amounts of joy.  I had big plans.  I would get a real marching band to perform the horn breakdown!  I would write to Macklemore himself and convince him to come!  I enlisted the help of my two friends Sam and Ricky, and together we made an instructional video and started to spread the word. 

Macklemore never wrote back.  The college marching band I had lined up went on summer vacation.  I was called to attend staff training away from phone and email contact the week leading up to the mob.  By the time Friday rolled around, four unlikely people had answered the call for marching band musicians: a viola, a trombone, a melodica, and a piccolo.  We had our speakers, we had an ad on funcheap.com, and I had the sinking feeling you get in your stomach when you set something in motion that is spiraling wildly out of your control.

I was tentatively planning on showing up in the first place, but when Jenny ended an unrelated email with the line, “COME TO THE FLASHMOB!!!  And if you know any marching bands, send ‘em my way”, my curiosity piqued. A few days later, when I walked into the kitchen for a glass of water only to discover my wife practicing the moves in the tutorial, attendance became all but guaranteed.

We hopped on the BART Friday evening without a great deal of time to spare, but as we dashed up the stairs of the station, people were still milling around on the sidewalk. As is often the case when presented with the task of trying to corral a group of free spirits into concrete plans, things were running a bit late. There was definitely a feeling of anticipation in the air, as the “surprise” factor of the the flashmob had become mildly diluted after the event was featured on a popular local website. Of course, the gathering hordes of amateur performers ready to break out in dance at a moment’s notice didn’t exactly help things to remain inconspicuous, either. It didn’t matter. Once the opening piano chords of “Can’t Hold Us” began to play, cheers erupted and teenaged break dancers took to the proverbial stage. As the vast majority of observers pushed forward in attempts to secure a better view, I decided ‘up’ was the more appropriate direction to move in this instance. I was fortunate enough to locate an empty spot on top of a newspaper stand, and a quick climb resulted in an unobstructed seat for the remainder of the performance. As it turned out, I had managed to sit right next to three large garbage bags full of balloons, and when cued by those better informed than I, my small contribution in the special effects department was assisting in their release.

The amount of fun the participants were having was evident in the smiles on their faces. Was it so crowded that many of them weren’t able to move effectively? Sure. Did a large of amount of them ignore the “don’t mirror this” instruction in the video tutorial? A solid yes, to the point where the incongruence actually looked planned. But in the end, it was all irrelevant. The flashmob’s mastermind was hoisted up on the shoulders of her fans, and everyone ran it back one more time for good measure.

A scene was unfolding at the Powell Street BART Station, and it wasn’t pretty.  A cop and a preacher were engaged in a shouting match, and a crowd had gathered to watch.  Sam took advantage of the commotion, and pulled the car up to the curb. “What did I do wrong?” the preacher demanded.  Posturing wildly, the cop slapped handcuffs on his wrists and growled something about amplified sound.  Shielded by a row of newspaper boxes, we unloaded two giant speakers, a generator and a gas can, and I covered them hastily with a tarp.  I might be going to jail tonight.

It was 6:54pm, and there were way too many people for comfort at this particular intersection on this particular Friday.  I nodded at a group of my Frisbee friends, waved cheerfully at my cousin, and tried to pretend like everything was normal.  I walked through the buzzing mass of people and they parted, unbidden, to let me through; each person I passed trying to catch my eye as if we were good friends in on the same joke.  I realized we might as well be friends – we’d likely spent a few hours together on youtube.  “It’s her!” someone whispered.  “That’s the Macklemob girl.”  They snapped pictures.  I squirmed under their attention, suddenly self-conscious of my moon boots and sparkly neon adventure pants.

The cop had caught sight of our equipment, and he was on the warpath.  Smiling sweetly, I listened as he spat out words like misdemeanor and arrested and video surveillance, and calmly explained what we were here to do.  I could see him sizing up the growing crowd (we were reaching 500 now), and he deflated a little.  He gave the go-ahead to Sam to set up the speakers, and biked away.  The trombonist’s mother appeared at my shoulder.  Her son must have been in elementary school.  “The police are across the street!  We have to go now,” she said.  “GO!” I yelled to Ricky, who was controlling the play button.  He went, and the cheer from the crowd was the last thing I heard before the beat dropped.

I have seen it once before, but the sight of hundreds of people dancing the moves that I created in imperfect unison is one I may never get used to.  I could almost feel every heartbeat thumping in time to the bass, and I knew that we would remember for a long time that we are part of something much bigger.  We ducked, we rolled, we jumped, we threw our hands in the air (carefully, because we were packed in so tight); we danced.  The marching band solo hit, and the unlikely quartet played their unlikely instruments like they might never play another note for as long as they live.  The song ended and people were buzzing with joy, hugging each other, hoisting me up on their shoulders, chanting, “One more time!  One more time!” 

We did it one more time, with feeling. 

The post Anatomy of a Flashmob appeared first on Rookerville.

A bunch of us wanted to share some quick thoughts pertaining to Mother’s Day.  Below is a collection from a few writers:

Andrew Rose:

My mom’s family is 100% Italian-Catholic from the Bronx, and my upbringing reflected this strongly. Dinner was pasta multiple times a week. Misbehavior led to a wooden spoon. Parent-child communication meant gesticulating wildly with your hands while yelling rapid-fire sentences at one another, and regardless of what you were about to do, you were definitely going to break your neck. That caffeinated brown liquid you drink in the morning? KWAW-fee. The place where your socks go? DRAW-ah. Silence was meant for church, and otherwise, ALL SYSTEMS GO. The first few times my then-girlfriend-now-wife heard me on the phone with my mother, she thought we were constantly fighting. No, I assured her, this is just how we talk. Sorry, tAWK. As the oldest son and grandson in the family, my mom’s devotion to me also likely set totally unrealistic expectations for my future relationships with women. Alas, no one will ever put me on a pedestal quite like she does, but the skinny, blonde, very-not-Italian girl I married fits the bill well enough.

A few years ago, my mom’s mother passed away, and the family did not react well, to put it lightly. My grandmother was probably the strongest person I’ve ever known, and how she managed to keep her family afloat with a deceased husband prior to any of her four children being old enough to drive is beyond me. She was the bond that held them all together. I joke with my mom sometimes about how alike the two of them are becoming, mostly because they are both slightly insane. But besides the tangential monologues and constant fretting, their strength and dedication the familial unit in all situations, at all costs, solidifies their similarity. And really, that’s all you can ask.

Happy Mother’s Day to the woman who holds it all together.

Scott Signorino:

Mother’s Day has always been a bittersweet holiday at the Signorino castle.  My mom, like everyone else’s mom, is the greatest mom on earth.  She’s a hardworking, straight-forward woman who does her best to understand her right-brained only child which is a pretty tall order to fill considering my mom is a Happy Days-era Jersey girl from a family of six.  My mom’s a waitress and sometimes a bartender and so Mother’s Day takes on a different meaning for her than just flowers and a brunch paid for by dad and Scott.  My mom works at a fine dining restaurant a few miles outside of Doylestown where I grew up and her knack at interpersonal communication has caused her to befriend politicians, lawyers, judges, the guy who now fixes all of our family cars, people who have given me job interviews, and an automotive baron who owns about 75% of all of the businesses in Doylestown.  This same knack has caused her to be a stellar waitress and sometimes-bartender and she essentially makes it rain when it comes to tips on Mother’s Day, the busiest restaurant day of the year.  So while I’ll be dragging myself out of bed this Sunday morning and schlepping it to Doylestown from Center City on the long and tortuous R5 line, my mom will have been at work for about four hours of a ten hour day.  She’ll get home in her uniform around 6:30, we’ll have family dinner, she’ll try to give me part of the money she made that day, I’ll give her some flowers I bought at Acme and a funny card with some smart ass remark I wrote in it and then I’ll head home and my mom will go to bed.  I don’t think I can give my mom the credit she deserves on Mother’s Day because she won’t give it to herself.  She’s held two jobs until I was 28, one always being at a restaurant, and when she retired from corporate accounting, she’s continued and she’s now 64 years old. My mom doesn’t get a break on Mother’s Day because she wants to do right by us like she always does.  Mom – I know you read Rookerville and I want you to know that I love you and you’re the most important woman in my life and I wouldn’t have the same work ethic or ambition or ability to talk to people I didn’t know that well if it weren’t for what you’ve passed on to me.  Happy Mother’s Day, I hope you make it rain one more time.

Russ Stevens:

My first memories begin around 3-4 when I was in pre-K, a year early.  At the end of the school year, I said “Mommy I need a break” (because my life was SO hard) and my mother obliged.  For the next full year, I got to spend every single day with my mom.  My routine was so specific, that I still remember it.  Dunkin Donuts, where I’d get a donut and sneak some of my mom’s coffee.  I never liked it, but I always hoped one day I would.  I got to go the park every day, and then come home to watch Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers and be read to before naptime.  Eventually, I got so tired of having to wait for my reading time that I started to pretend to read by myself.   My mom seeing this, and knowing her older son hated reading, spent as much time as possible helping me learn to read.  By the next year, I was the age I should be in kindergarten, and I was the only kid in the class who was already reading chapter books.

I guess my point is this:  I became an English and Philosophy major down the road and to this day and it feels as though reading is and will always be my first love.  This is what makes moms awesome.  They are there with you from day one, helping you learn and grow and figure out the person you are going to be.  I cannot say for sure if I would be the person I am today without her care.  Even as you get older and sometimes dread the phone call you might have to make because she may have an opinion about what are/are not doing, remember that she really only ever wanted you to be the best person you could be. Relax. And say I love you.

Jennifer O’Connell:

When I look back on pieces I’ve written, I find all sorts of topics.  African leg infections.  Motorcycle marriage proposals.  Aboriginal bachelor pads.  Whitney Houston flashmobs.  Shiny spandex adventure pants.  Falling in love and out of planes, narrow escapes and near misses, eating tarantulas, fleeing venomous snakes, wrangling llamas.  Adventures, misadventures, personal illuminations…they’re all there, save one topic: my mother.

I don’t know why it is so hard to put her on paper.  Fed up with trying to do it myself, I’ve resorted to someone else’s words.  It’s the week before Mothers’ Day and I’m standing in a supermarket leafing through stacks of greeting cards, trying to find one that resonates with what I want to say.  What do you say to a woman who is everywhere at once?  I can pick out small things I love about her: the way she throws her head back and laughs a little too loudly, corny puns, apple coffee cake, weathered hands, her favorite hue of indigo.  She is modest, except for when it comes to command of the English language or her aim with a frisbee.  At the family reunion last summer we were all telling stories, singing songs, showing off talents.  “What can you do?” we asked my mother.  “I do a damn good impersonation of bacon,” she said.

I heard a saying once: “there are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it.”  I can’t put my mother into words, because she is in everything I do.  She is in every adventure and misadventure; she is in all that I am.  I sigh my defeat to Hallmark and turn and walk away.  I know that soon we will sit on the deck in the fading dusk, watching the mountains, saying more through our silence than we could with all of the words in the world.

Matt Cargile:

The ability to amaze someone by just being normal is a luxury not everyone has.  And even those who do have it don’t really get it with everyone they interact with.  I’m one of the lucky few, but it’s really only with my mother.  See for her I’m a miracle child; so strange how someone can have such a different point of view for your personal development. In my looks back at growing up I have some realizations.  1) even if I was right about grades really not being a sign of intelligence, I could’ve put a little extra effort in and gotten A’s.  2) Picking a college on a whim isn’t the best move.  Especially if you don’t even know the college and only went to check it out when it visited your High School cause it got you out of AP Physics. 3) Just cause you can film a party you threw at your house while your parents were away, doesn’t mean you should.  But if you asked my mom she’d exclaim that 1) it’s amazing I even graduated high school (not like I was a bad kid, but literally miracle baby amazing), 2) Best college choice ever, and she tells everyone else’s kid they should go there too, 3) she’s keeping the tape for when I run for president (which I’m never doing).  See my mom dealt with me nearly dying a couple times after being born.  This is a very interesting time for such dramatic occurrences cause it’s literally like it never happened to me.  So while I grew up, driving like an idiot, doing stupid stunts on my bike, and just floating through school my mom was busy being amazed I didn’t have brain damage.  Amazed I could even talk like a normal person.  In the end I didn’t need to do much to impress my mom, but in her eyes I’ve exceeded all expectations and then some.  For what’s it worth I just did my best to listen to my parents and that seemed to get me pretty far. And now my mother is always praising the skies for gifting me to her, which is a nice sentiment but if I could tell her one thing is that maybe she should thank herself a bit more for who I am.  I know I do.

Jake Serlan:

The angriest I was ever at my Mother occurred six time zones away from her. I was abroad for college, living off an unsubsidized loan paying for six credits I didn’t more than I needed to graduate. But, the girlfriend said she wanted to go to London and wouldn’t go with me. So, there I was.

I was reminded of all these facts by Mom’s delayed shrill through my English style Nokia that still played the Nokia ring tone. ‘Wasted money’ this, she said and ‘squandered time’ that. “My life is mine” I said or something equally teenagery despite being in my early twenties. At some point, I started yelling. I think I did anyway, cause she asked “why are you yelling” in that Motherly way that knows why your yelling and her mission was accomplished.

By the time I hung up on her my face was beet red and I was sweating. I had found my way to the bathroom some how and my girlfriend looked in on me with concern.

“Please come out of the bathroom,” she said.

“Why?!?!”

“Because you’re about to punch the mirror.”

When I looked into the mirror, I was greet by a man who looked just like me, only with his fist cocked back, loaded for a knock out blow.

“Oh.” I said.

I’m not prone outbreaks of anger, much less violence. It took me a long time to realize how I got to that point.

My mom never got mad. She was disappointed.

And she was the one person I never wanted to disappoint.

I would discover as I got older that I couldn’t disappoint her. Not really. Even if she didn’t agree with me or I her, she encouraged my convictions. I would never have gotten the nerve up to raise my fist to the mirror if she hadn’t instilled my sense of indignation, and I wouldn’t have been able to resist throwing the punch without her ability to judge a situation in a second.

My passion comes from my Mom. And I love her for it.

Justine Kolsky:

How do you purchase a gift of appreciation for the person who literally brought you into this world? You can’t. Well technically you can but, the flowers you’ve sent, the Spa day you’ve purchased, or the nice lunch you’ve planned doesn’t compare to the LIFE that she has given you. In most cases, your mom sacrificed her killer body for 9 months to give you a nice little space to grow in.  How selfless is that? Most people are thinking “well it’s not selfless she wanted children” and to you I say, are you serious? Yes, some people plan pregnancy but for MOST, it just happens. So before you start to think you’re the best gift your parents have ever received, think again. A mother is the best gift we all have received in one-way or another (biological or not).

Cyn (aka Mom) is not your average mother and that’s what I appreciate about her so much. She has no issue with confidence and plays the part of detective, doctor, dancer, banker, and weather(wo)man without hesitation. To be clear, professionally, she is none of these things but does a damn good job pretending she is. To be honest, I don’t know how Cyn has made it this long without murdering me. I am the reason why I don’t want to have children. I was the worst child up until about a year ago and Cyn put up with all of it without batting an eye. That’s how Moms are. They are there for you unconditionally, regardless of the situation.

Mom-

Thank you for calming me down when I was having temper tantrums, staying by my side all night when I burnt my hands on the radiator at that restaurant, letting me cut my hair however I wanted to (even though I looked like a boy), allowing me to take the car on my first day getting my license, not getting that mad when I crashed it, picking me up at 2am from a sleepovers because I missed you too much, carting me around until I was 16, laughing it off when I call you a bitch or moon you after dinner as a “thank you”, introducing me to chocolate, introducing me to old movies, always making me aware of the dangers of wherever I’m living at the time, calling everyday just to say “hi”, being brutally honest, and putting up with all of my bullshit. Sorry I couldn’t be home today to celebrate with you but hopefully this will suffice for now. Cheers to you Ma! Keep dancing, humming, cracking cases, and running the hospital – enjoy today, I love you.

The post Mother’s Day: A Rookerville Collection appeared first on Rookerville.