Smiles Boston Project
da5zeay
on "Smile Project Boston". An artist, Bren Bataclan, paints smiley
whimsical paintings and leaves them around cities like Boston for
people to pick up for free. You can keep the painting, but the caveat
is that you must promise to smile more often at random people, then
write about your experiences.
One excerpt:
One winter afternoon I was walking through Holyoke Center in Harvard
Square after coming from the doctor's office and realizing that I was
going to have to take a leave from my job at the university. I was
crying and nothing that my sister seemed to say to me was giving me any
solace. As I was walking by one of the benches I saw someone smiling
at me. I smiled and kept walking in a daze. As I was about to exit
out of the door, I unhitched my arm from my sister and turned around
and started walking towards the bench without saying anything to her -
something was pulling me back. It was what had made me smile and what
had caught my attention from the corner of my eye. It was the green
finger-smiling-good mood maker-alien cartoon. There he was sitting on
a bench waiting for me. I couldn't believe it. He had the whole bench
to himself and the center was packed with people milling about.
Attached to him was the note 'This painting is yours if you promise to
smile at people more often'. I stopped my crying and started laughing.
I swear to God that this meeting gave me something that I hadn't felt
in months - lightness and I know this sounds cheezy but hope. It felt
like a sign or something. And it broke my darkness. Even my sister
was laughing - kind of uncontrollably. It was the best mood maker and
as we left with it, it seemed to give us the lift we needed or sent out
some sort of vibe to other people around us because we met like 3
awesome dogs that night, a bunch of super nice people, and kind of kept
running into random good energy 'stuff'. I kept it in my bedroom for
six months. I'm in a much better place now and felt like it was time
for him to work his magic on someone else. My friend just had a baby.
They named her Nelly but her real name is Prunella - the poor thing -
she needed some magic. So now its in her baby room. And I told her
older sister Bernadine (I know, I don't know why they are obsessed with
naming their kids with these names that belong to great-Aunts) who is
five now that when she wanted to she could take out the painting -
which still has the sign taped to it - and put it in some random place
in Jamaica Plain for someone else to pick up. She liked that idea.