BRATTLEBORO — At 5 p.m. Saturday, people mill around the Brattleboro Food Co-op parking lot looking warily for information.
Selectboard member Daryl Pillsbury moves to the edge of the hill overlooking the parking area, unfurling a microphone for Brattleboro Community Television.
Pillsbury corrals the small crowd that warily and steadily gathers over the next few minutes. WKVT News Director Gorty Baldwin cranks up his car radio.
At 5:15 sharp, the oom-pahs of “Dance Little Bird” come over the car radio, and for several minutes, the 50-or-so men, women and children, flanked by puzzled bystanders and excited spectators alike, perform the chicken dance.
And then, after a somewhat disjointed flurry of beak-ing, wing-ing, tail-ing, clapping and the steps, the flash mob disbands as quickly as its participants arrives.
The concept of a flash mob - defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a public gathering of complete strangers, organized via the Internet or mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse again”- originated in the 2003 as an experiment organized by Bill Wasik, a senior editor of Harper's.
According to a story published in Time that year, Wasik, interested in “the social reasons people go to see performing arts,” wondered what would happen “if the performance were taken out of the equation.”
Flash mobs have organized 200 people to freeze in place on cue in Grand Central Station, ride on the subway with no pants and do a Ghostbusters routine in the New York Public Library.
Cloaked (clucked?) in mystery
In many ways, it's just another day in Brattleboro when a group of people do the chicken dance amid puzzled shoppers and construction debris.
But this group assembled due to the efforts of a person they don't even know.
The idea was the brainchild of the person who has assumed the pseudonymous identity of “Brattleboro, Vermont” on Facebook since April 2009.
Impersonating an entire town on a social networking site has its challenges. Birthday? December 27, 1723. Relationship? It's complicated. Earlier this month, the conversation on Brattleboro, Vermont's “wall” strongly implied a tryst with the town of Vernon. Brattleboro, Vermont also Likes Townshend, Vermont.
While the social networking site's terms of service require real names, Brattleboro, Vermont has fallen under the radar, creating an identity that has attracted 4,999 friends as of Monday.
In the electronic trail of correspondence on the account's wall, some friends are clearly confused, thinking it is somehow a town-sanctioned presence on Facebook. Others use it as a means of publicizing local events to an audience of thousands.
Occasionally, Brattleboro, Vermont will post a question or statement, many cryptic and a few pointed.
In a private Facebook message, Brattleboro, Vermont invited questions other than his identity. He identified himself as a male, a lifelong resident of town, and a graduate of Brattleboro Union High School.
“Very few” people know his true identity, he wrote. He also maintains a separate Facebook account under his real name.
Brattleboro, Vermont said that he “sent out a few requests to random people at first” to build up an audience. From there, friends came easily, wittingly or unwittingly.
“But once I started posting stuff about flash mob I had a hard time keeping up with friend requests,” he wrote.
On Saturday afternoon, he wrote that he would be there, watching.
He said the flash mob idea came as a result of a “local boy” who suggested it. “[He] asked if he thought I could get a flash mob going around Brattleboro,” he wrote. “So I proposed the idea and strangely enough I received over 100 messages in 24 hours.”
Worth the risk
According to Peter Case, the program director of WKVT who himself writes a column for the Reformer and broadcasts under the name “Fish,” the radio station agreed to broadcast several minutes of the tune, even though it hardly qualifies as a classic hit.
Case said he read the first message that Brattleboro, Vermont posted about the idea on Sept. 17 and messaged him via Facebook.
“I didn't know what a flash mob was,” said Case, adding that he tried to get the mysterious social networker to appear on his show, “but he didn't want to, because he said he's fairly well known in town.”
“Well, I just assume it's a him,” Case said. “He could very well be a female.”
Observing the fragility of participating in an event organized by a person masquerading as a town, Case said on Saturday morning that it would be worth the gamble.
“It'll be a fun thing if it happens,” he said. “If it's a hoax, we'll play 2½ minutes of bad polka and get back to the real thing.”