As New York City emerges from the coronavirus-related lockdown, Michaela Farrell took to Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park on Wednesday to lock it down.
The 24-year-old Bedford-Stuyvesant resident arrived there at noon to set up a socially distant, mask-required speed-dating pop-up, in part to make up for her lost time.
“Do you miss dates? I sure as hell do!” the puppeteer and theater professional wrote on a sign, which she kept perched against a small table topped with hand sanitizer. “Recently I realized I have not been on a date in one year. In honor of PRIDE, I am attempting to make up for 52 dateless weekends by going on 52 speed dates TODAY!”
“That’s a good park for human contact and people wanting to make some connections,” Farrell, who put on puppet performances there in March in the weeks leading up to the city’s shutdown, tells The Post.
Now, she quips, “I’m single, baby!”
Indeed, Farrell — who identifies as queer — is single, but she also used this pop-up as a means to explore ways of creative expression at a time when entertainment venues remain closed.
“I’m trying to find safe ways to make live performance,” says Farrell, who’s an ensemble member of New York Neo-Futurists, a downtown theater known for “The Infinite Wrench” series of two-minute plays performed in front of a live audience. “Is a date performance?” However, she says she was portraying herself, not a character, and overall, it wasn’t performative.
What she found most of all — even though she ultimately completed only 36 of 52 dates — was that people still crave connections following the springtime coronavirus outbreak.
“It was just really beautiful,” she says of the experience. “Looking into the eyes of someone you don’t know — when was the last time you did that? It’s very special.”
That said, not everyone who approached her (thanks to a friend she enlisted as a maître d’) was looking for love.
“It meant more to me to sit down and talk to people and connect with an individual who I didn’t know,” she says of the folks who stopped by, all of whom stayed for two minutes each. “A date could be a lot of things, the cool thing is learning about new people.”
But two people, she says, definitely looked for romance. One person named Kate came by — and Farrell was so engrossed in the conversation that she forgot to hand out a promised prize, which was also advertised on her sign: “a paperclip to remind you to hold on, but not too tight.” Another, named Cory, said they’d follow Farrell on Instagram but hasn’t yet.
“There was nothing like, there’s going to be a second date,” she says of how the day concluded. “It just reminded me of how much this city is built off of the little random connections and the random moments you have throughout your day.”
Farrell says she’d consider doing this again, though.
“It’s very easy to do — it’s literally just going to a park, and making a sign and lookin’ good,” she says. “I want to get to 52, baby, and I want to go past it. I want to reach for the stars.”