![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/colin08.jpg\" "\\"colin08\\"")
<\/a>I\u2019m driving on Route 1 in Falmouth behind a silver SUV with the vanity plate FUGAWE.<\/em> Hello, 1920s vaudeville (look it up\u2013that\u2019s what the Internet is for).<\/p>\nThe \u201cChurch Lady,\u201d the functionary at the Department of Motor Vehicles who decides whether our license plate requests are too risqu\u00e9, must have dozed off in the back of the theater.<\/p>\n
Then it hits me. \u201cEveryone is an artist,\u201d the German installation artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) is famous for saying.<\/p>\n
Certainly in Maine. I don\u2019t have to tell you, every day we spend here is a creative, if subversive, adventure.<\/p>\n
Look, here\u2019s another plate up ahead: WIKDPSA<\/em>. Must be another performance RTST<\/em>, with fellow commuters as the target ODDYNTS<\/em>.<\/p>\n Because we choose to live here instead of simply existing somewhere else, we\u2019re all performance artists and participating audience members.<\/p>\n Have you ever been mesmerized by the dance, the graceful blur of hands, of an expert Mainer folding an Italian sandwich into wax paper? Or been certain you heard a soaring musical score as you watched a lobsterman drop his traps in the early morning mist?<\/p>\n Picture a young couple in the lobster business working deep into the night over an oilcloth table. He and she, their heads together, sketch out design schemes and ponder colors for just that perfect, fantastically coded, polka-dotted lobster buoy all their own to dot our seas. \u201cEureka!\u201d she says. \u201cKILLAH<\/em>!\u201d he replies. This is not slap-dash. It\u2019s no accident. It\u2019s love.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the black humor. We all participate in, \u201cCold enough for you?\u201d And Mainers all know that tourist season is a hunting term.<\/p>\n Responding to our psychic geography, we have no choice but to be artistic. It doesn\u2019t diminish us to be picturesque; we earn it the hard way. Think of the creative extremes we go through just not<\/em> to use a parking garage. \u201cHey, I\u2019m not going in there, Mistah Man. I like fresh air, and I\u2019ll be darned if I\u2019m going to pay perfectly good money to suffocate.\u201d<\/p>\n Is it not an artistic endeavor to root for the Red Sox?<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the ticket: Take the Maine Eastern Railroad foliage tour this fall and watch the art unfold in front of your eyes. To the right side of the frame, watch a hobo sneak a smoke. Or was he just a plywood silhouette?<\/p>\n Each of us has a role to play.<\/p>\n September 2012 I\u2019m driving on Route 1 in Falmouth behind a silver SUV with the vanity plate FUGAWE. Hello, 1920s vaudeville (look it up\u2013that\u2019s what the Internet is for). The \u201cChurch Lady,\u201d the functionary at the Department of Motor Vehicles who decides whether our license plate requests are too risqu\u00e9, must have dozed off in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":247,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[34],"class_list":["post-6535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editor","tag-september-2012"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6535"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14470,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6535\/revisions\/14470"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"