By JEN CHEN
Back in June, my co-worker Justin went to Barnes & Noble on the Plaza and found a handwritten note stuck in a book. As he documented in this Plog entry, he unfolded the note and found something akin to a missing persons ad. The writer, a young woman, left the letter for a guy she spotted on a previous visit.
“You were on the second floor of B and N. I saw you looking at me and we made eyes a few times,” she wrote. “It looked like you were with another woman, so I didn’t want to be too obvious, but I wanted to say, you’re very handsome. I have black hair. If she wasn’t actually with you, tell me what I was wearing.” The note, which was written on flowery stationery, included a Craigslist e-mail address at the end.
Well, we finally found the note writer (kind of).
Over the weekend, I was at Broadway Café when I saw a guy who looked like a character out of All the King’s Men. I liked his straw hat, his purple tie and his election button, so I went up to his table to interview him for Clothes Whores. Paul Shortt, 27, told me he’s a student at the Kansas City Art Institute. He’s a painting major, but he doesn’t actually paint – he’s more into something he calls performance animation.
He takes Missed Connections ads from Craigslist and goes back to the locations where the almost-meetings originally occurred. Then he tries to put the ad back in its location. He calls it a “Missed Connection Intervention.” At first, he shot video of the locations while he read the ad aloud. He moved on to placing a physical version of the ad back in the original spot. That’s how Justin came across that note – Paul had placed a few handwritten copies of that particular ad in some random books at Barnes & Noble.
He said he tries to pick ads that imply “something was there” between the couple. On his Web site, Paul posts other Missed Connection Intervention photos. One shows an ad written in chalk on a sidewalk at Loose Park. Another documents his greatest feat yet: an ad composed in squiggly frosting on a bakery cake at the Price Chopper at 103rd Street and State Line Road. He convinced the bakery department to display that cake in a refrigerated case. Paul said the cake decorator, a guy who was about 21, was curious about the cake order. “I told him it was for a friend. I had to stretch the truth a little bit,” he said.
Paul said he’s interested in exploring the connections between people as well as the lack of connection. He doesn’t do this to mock the people who have placed their ads. “It’s as much about my own loneliness,” he said. On his site, he writes, “By intervening I reflect my own longings and failures as well as others in hopes of challenging people to act on their own impulses.”
After the Price Chopper cake, though, he’s not sure what to do next. “I can’t top that,” he said.
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