Raod Cone Connoisseurs

Just like a gang of off-duty

cops, these cones shoot the

breeze over by the lamppost. 

My perception of road cones completely changed when I started making theatre with them. On the street I began perceiving common pylons as a population of inanimate actors whose job is to keep people and situations safe from each other. One the one hand they protect people from temporary urban circumstances, such as potholes or worksites, on the other hand they try to protect things as frail as wet paint or cement from the blemishes of oblivious humans. Like citified scarecrows, road cones exist as a scattered phalanx of passive uniformed guards, bearing two reflective stripes on their bright orange coats that silently say, "Hey! Watch it buddy!"

But this clean system of clean orange cones neatly demarcating messy situations is pretty imperfect. Not every street that needs a cone has one—sometimes the pothole, wet cement, or other hazard lives unguarded indefinitely. Conversely, not every cone on the street is on active duty, for after the pothole's filled and the cement's dried, workers often drive off and leave their cones behind for citizens to ignore, appropriate, or maybe make into art. What happens then is the intended job of the common road cone gets taken less seriously in a Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf sense: danger is not always signified with a road cone, and road cones do not always signify danger.

What are they doing
behind that plant?

There is someone in Philadelphia who cares about the job of the common road cone enough to tweet and post photos about it. Here's an article on her, and here's her Twitter feed. I love her perspective as an urban planner who invites an eye for the theatricality of these street scenes. And it's nice to know that I'm not the only one personifying inanimate objects. Stay tuned for a follow-up on this post in the near future.