Show-Stoppers for All

This article was originally published in Scribbles Number 4 on December 3, 1993. This was 10 years before the term "flash mob" was coined according to Wikipedia.

Do you remember the first time you saw a musical? The main character got excited and began to sing in public. Instead of looking on in fascinated horror, the bystanders joined in on the chorus, waved their arms and danced in step. “How come,” you asked your parents, “all those people know that song already?” “It’s just make believe,” they told you, “it doesn’t happen in real life.”

But wouldn’t it be fun? If it did happen in real life? When you’ve just been promoted or that certain someone has smiled at you in that certain way or the doctor says you don’t have cancer after all? Wouldn’t it be great to leap in the air and start to sing? The woman selling flowers would throw you an armload of carnations. The people you’d offer them to would join in the song as the hot dog man sang bass and waved his barbecue fork. The people at the bus-stop would form a chorus line behind you while the bicycle couriers sang ‘diddy-doo-wop’. Wouldn’t it be great?

We could do it. The foundation is in place: aerobics, step-dance lessons and karaoke bars. For the dancing, people would learn basic steps and guidelines for improvisation. For the singing, people could start with well known songs or songs in which the backup singers repeat lines back to the lead singer. As time goes by the songs and choreography would become more elaborate and impressive.

There would have to be limits. We couldn’t have production numbers occurring at major traffic intersections every day at rush hour. Offices couldn’t interrupt business for fifteen minutes every hour. Along with limits on how often and where these events could occur there would have to be a mechanism to ensure that everyone had a fair chance to be the star. The simplest method of limiting the number of production numbers would be to issue permits or “show-stopper cards”.

If we gave each individual a “show-stopper card” once every ten years, a city of 800,000 people like Ottawa would have 1,500 musical numbers every week, or 214 every day. If an average of one hundred people participated in each production, the average person would participate in about ten musicals per year.

There might be pressure from those who are too shy to be leading men or leading ladies to make the “show-stopper cards” transferable. This should be avoided. Shy people could always be assisted by the extroverted. It would be a shame for these people to lose out on such fun. It would also be a shame if people traded their “show-stopper cards” for money. Singing about life’s major milestones should never become a monopoly of the rich.

If we get to work on this right now, in a few years our children will be watching an old movie, “how come,” they’ll ask, “that man and lady fell in love and all the people around didn’t start to sing and dance?” Will they believe you when you tell them that people didn’t do that in the old days or will you just tell them that the man and the lady had already used their show-stopper cards?