It won’t bother me in the slightest if I never see Justin Bieber. Couldn’t care less if I never see Alcatraz or the birthplace of Liberace.
But golly, I’d sure like to watch a flash mob.
Like most folks, I’ve seen them only when they’ve appeared out of nowhere — on an airplane, say, in a train station, at the food court of a shopping mall — and some wise soul had thought to take some video and post it on YouTube.
Flash mobs, of course, are never announced. You never get a heads up that a choir or a band or a dance troupe will be performing at 3 p.m. on the third Friday of the month in the parking lot of the local high school.
That’s not how a flash mob works.
“Wow,” I said the other day. I was on Facebook, watching. “Lucky people.”
“What’s that?” asked the husband.
“Lucky people,” I repeated. I was speaking about the lucky people who happened to be at a wedding when five dozen dancers began to do the macarena. It was amazing.
I’d like to see one in person.
“How can we find a flash mob?” I asked the husband. “I’d even pay to see one.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“You just stumble upon them in some public place,” he reminded me. “You don’t get tipped off ahead of time.”
Weird. I have been in more than a few public places in the course of my lifetime. Let’s see: amusement parks, baseball games, supermarkets, to name a few.
Number of flash mobs I’ve seen? Ze-ro.
“We should go to a public place this weekend,” I said.
“We are,” said the husband. “We’re going to the driving range, remember? That’s a public place.”
I told him the odds of a flash mob appearing at the range would be next to nil. A flash mob, I pointed out, would annoy the golfers if they began to sing in the middle of their back swings.
And so, I carry on, ever hopeful, when I’m out and about.
On a trip to the grocery store, I might surreptitiously trail a woman I’ve spotted in the cereal aisle, certain that she’s carrying a trumpet in her handbag.
A wait in a bank line-up may see me eyeballing the tellers and the loans officers, sure that, on the count of noon, they’ll launch into a perfectly choreographed tap dance.
I wait, getting out in public as much as I can, poised to take some video.
Seeing a mob would be brilliant, of course. It sure the heck beats Justin Bieber.
