August
2000
The
Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping
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Picture this: a priest hand-cuffed
next to a four-foot tall plastic Mickey Mouse doll sitting in the
back of a
police car in
the middle of Times Square. This is the "Reverend Billy" arrested
after delivering a sermon to bewildered shoppers in the bustling mid-town
Disney store this past winter.
Bill Talen is a performance artist and activist who takes his
anti-consumerist message directly to the people, staging witty street
theater and subversive practical jokes. He "preaches" in the
role of the Reverend Billy and performs with his troupe in "Meccas" of
mass consumerism. Here the Reverend reports from the front-lines.
Tourists press their noses against the windows: "Who is this priest
in the car with Mickey?" It’s great that these cops would
hand-cuff the little vaudevillian mouse-devil as well, for the humor.
Of course the cops gather around the scene with the jokes rising out
of them as the donuts sink into them.
Resistance to consumerism is unthinkable. Resistance to Disney is Unamerican.
Three tourists came over to the car and flaunt their Disney shopping
bags. So my sermon in the store just inflamed the buying for these ladies.
My first offense: trespassing on hallowed Disney property. They let
me go after a half hour at Midtown South, which is the precinct known
for its decades long tradition of demanding favors from sex workers.
What kickback will Michael Eisner offer them?
Reverend Billy’s Disney Store Sermon
"Children stop shopping for a moment. Listen to me. Mickey
Mouse wants to play. He reaches for us with three-fingered hands. Mickey
Mouse is the Anti-Christ.
And we are in Hell now. It registers as a kind of minor happiness. Elton
John is singing over the floor-to-ceiling monitor. All the Disney animals
at the watering hole look up and smile. Winnie the Pooh and Tinkerbell
are carried along on the backs of zebras.
But children, the tchotchkes in the Disney Store cause memory loss.
And the question is, how many millions of us can forget our own lives
and be forced here and there like water? The Disney magicians are amazed
that we are still following their little smiling animals. There is only
one sin, children! Shopping.
I am preaching in the Disney Store today because I am a tourist myself.
This is Manhattan as Suburban Mall. This is a fatal disease known as
Involuntary Entertainment; drowning in the Sea of Identical Details.
This is the moment we stop shopping—the revolution of no shopping.
We can start trying to remember what we imagined. We can begin to recall
what desire was when it was not supervised by the Mouse."
"Don’t Shop! Save your
Souls!"
I "preach" in the role of Reverend Billy, during the Christmas
shopping days at the Times Square Disney Store. I work with a group
of New Yorkers doing "tourist dramas" inside the store.
This corner of 42nd Street and 7th Avenue is an orgy of all things
Disney. Going up its two sides are billboards covered with gleeful
children,
giant mouse ears, Florida theme park ads, movies in release, ABC TV
shows and credit card tie-ins. The advertising of every new Disney
product
must be shown here, and the buildings beneath are lost to view. The "magic" of the Disney Company seems almost uncontainable,
so superior is it to its surroundings, so much brighter and freer—subject
to a set of laws that is denied the little pedestrian down below.
So this place exists where at one time in this neighborhood’s history
original staged dramas numbered in the hundreds each year. And that
this Disney store is here, on Broadway, somehow makes it the flagship
of homogenization. This is the takeover of the neighborhood of stories.
New Yorkers understand when they reflect on Times Square developments.
Often they go straight from the subject of Broadway/Disney to the ruination
of their own neighborhoods as they fill with Gaps, Banana Republics,
Kinko’s, Starbucks, K-Marts, et al. —"the sea of identical
details."
Disney needs New York, not New Yorkers. Probably 80 percent of this
store’s customers shop here at the rate of once or twice a year,
coming from outside the city, budgeting these expenses in their long-range
family planning.
Thus our "church" tries to re-create what the Disneyfication
of Times Square designs out—the activity that generates storytelling.
It is a return to original places; places that are human in scale and
in which those humans, not overwhelmed, are not speechless. Our faux
church is creating profiles of people who were here before, who worked
in the five buildings that Disney tore down to make one long room for
Mickey and his prancing deluge. We’ve studied records dating back
to the nineteenth century; we’ve read names on beautiful old longhand
documents, from leases to plumbing permits. We want to imagine them
and put them in our plays. It is telling that doing this, looking for
something pre-Disney, feels so subversive.
Note: Disney’s restoration of the New Amsterdam theater, 210 West
42nd Street, has to be acknowledged as a brilliant tactic by a company
that systematically erases place.
Our attempts at becoming personal here in the environment where only
products have personalities have begun to include the tourists themselves,
so that we are becoming, well, dramatic tourists. My preaching elicits
responses: sometimes they argue, sometimes they agree, sometimes they’re
just pissed. Gradually the tourists are beginning to talk. Given the
chance, these folks will repeat and embroider the stories that they
hear and send those stories on. After all, the revolution must be theirs.
What we can do is make a play and invite them to join in with a new
theatrical event on Broadway, the theater’s address being the
Disney Store.
Visit www.revbilly.com to
read more of Reverend Billy’s writings and for a schedule of
upcoming events. This fall, watch for appearances at a Starbucks near
you!
