Police have arrested a man dressed as tree for blocking traffic on Congress Street...as God is my witness. pic.twitter.com/VUFQY6Vyv0
— TVTEDDY (@TVTEDDY) October 24, 2016
Police in Portland, Maine, were called to remove a tree from the middle of the street on Monday. It turned out to be a man dressed as a tree.
Police identified the man as 30-year-old Asher Woodworth of Portland. He's been charged with obstructing a public way. Police say his motivation was to see how people would react to what he called his "performance" and how he might impact "people's natural choreography."
Woodworth had to be escorted from the intersection after he declined to move along as police requested. In other words, he refused to “leaf.” There are more puns about the incident that you can read at Buzzfeed.
He didn’t intend to create a spectacle or get arrested, but was “interested in asking, ‘Why can’t you walk slowly in front of a car?’ ”
In 2009 he was drawn to the bulbous, red-and-green pepper logo that topped a Chili’s restaurant. One night, after borrowing more than 450 feet of extension cords from the Bennington College [Vermont] sculpture department, he and three friends stretched the extension cords from the nearby Home Depot, across four lanes of traffic and onto the roof of the restaurant, where they used power tools to remove the $8,000 chili pepper.
They got caught. (Imagine that)
Felony grand larceny charges were reduced to petty theft if they stayed out of trouble for two years. They also were ordered to write an essay about the waste of taxpayer resources, and to hold a car wash in the Chili’s parking lot.
The sentencing judge also gave Woodworth and his friends some advice. “Try not to do stupid things in the future of this magnitude. Smaller stupid things are better.”
Maine. The way life should be!