September 2012

I’m driving on Route 1 in Falmouth behind a silver SUV with the vanity plate FUGAWE. Hello, 1920s vaudeville (look it up–that’s what the Internet is for).

The “Church Lady,” the functionary at the Department of Motor Vehicles who decides whether our license plate requests are too risqué, must have dozed off in the back of the theater.

Then it hits me. “Everyone is an artist,” the German installation artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) is famous for saying.

Certainly in Maine. I don’t have to tell you, every day we spend here is a creative, if subversive, adventure.

Look, here’s another plate up ahead: WIKDPSA. Must be another performance RTST, with fellow commuters as the target ODDYNTS.

Because we choose to live here instead of simply existing somewhere else, we’re all performance artists and participating audience members.

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?

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. “Eureka!” she says. “KILLAH!” he replies. This is not slap-dash. It’s no accident. It’s love.

Then there’s the black humor. We all participate in, “Cold enough for you?” And Mainers all know that tourist season is a hunting term.

Responding to our psychic geography, we have no choice but to be artistic. It doesn’t diminish us to be picturesque; we earn it the hard way. Think of the creative extremes we go through just not to use a parking garage. “Hey, I’m not going in there, Mistah Man. I like fresh air, and I’ll be darned if I’m going to pay perfectly good money to suffocate.”

Is it not an artistic endeavor to root for the Red Sox?

Here’s 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?

Each of us has a role to play.