Olin Park, Christmas 2001
They have a huge Christmas display you can see from John Nolen Drive.
The electronics are pretty crude: Anything that blinks or alternates is plugged into a big metal box with a large relay you can hear clicking back and forth.
For example: A railroad crossing sign with a little arm that goes up and down, is actually two arms. One in the raised position and one in the lowered position.
They alternate back and forth between which one is lit up, and to you, it looks like the arm is going up and down.
We stacked a couple of triads of reindeer up, with the one on the bottom constantly lit.
Then we took the two on top and plugged them into these devices so that they’d alternate back and forth between which one was lit.
From the highway it looked like a reindeer thrusting in and out of the one on the bottom.
After that, we hopped the fence for Edgewood College and walked up to the nativity scene.
I don’t know what we intended to do — scope out the electronics like we did at the park I guess and go from there, right?
As we got halfway up the driveway, the twenty foot high back drop started creaking and groaning and it fell forward, crashing down on the entire nativity scene.
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
I said “I think God is trying to tell us something.”
He goes, “Nah. It saw us coming and it surrendered.”
We called it a night.
I wouldn’t say that he was a religious fellow to put it mildly.
There was an unrelated nativity scene stunt where Baby Jesus was replaced with a Heavenly Ham from the Heavenly Ham Company.
And then there was that time some billboard up in Door County said: “Jesus is the answer, what is your question?” and the fucker spray painted “Who raped my son?” on the bottom.
I did snicker at some point in one of my interviews, only to be challenged with “Do you think this is funny?”
Apologies, but yeah, I do think that at least a couple of the things he did were quite funny.