How a Cut-Out of April Became a Community Event

It’s an almost-life-sized picture of April, cut into her actual shape, showing her beaming a warm smile to the viewer. An artist who supported April in her campaign for Virginia State Senate in 2015 made it on her own initiative, for display at campaign events.

It almost didn’t survive our move here, with April wanting to downsize it out of existence. But I was too fond of it to part with it, so with the help of friends the somewhat fragile cut-out eventually made it back to us, here at Riderwood.

And then we faced the challenge that April foresaw: what could we do with it, given that we have so little room to store anything, and that the cut-out, with its little stand to enable it to stand upright, requires more space than if it were merely a two-dimensional object.

Faced with that challenge, I came up with an idea. I thought it would be fun, but I had NO IDEA what a [big deal] it would turn out to be.
The hallway on which our apartment is located is something of a thoroughfare– we are on the indoor path that people take to get from one “neighborhood” to another. Relevant also is that everyone is encouraged to express themselves however they wish, as each apartment has a small shelf, as well as the wall above it, that people can use as a kind of public expression of themselves — pictures, flowers, a poster, an artwork. Almost every shelf has something.

We already were using our shelf for a set of four pictures –two from my family and two from April’s, each pair depicting a span of five generations from the oldest ancestors to new descendants. But the doorways of the apartments are indented from the hallways, which opens up a bit of floor space.

It was onto that floor space that I set up this very life-like cut-out of April– not only made from a very clear color photograph of April looking great in her campaign-worthy garb, but very nearly as tall as she is. With her back to one wall in that indentation, April’s likeness faced down the hall in the direction where people would suddenly see her as they turned – just after exiting the elevators – to walk past our apartment a mere twenty feet away.

As I said, I thought it would be fun– and right away it clearly was. Even before I placed it in our doorway, as I was carrying it through a public space there were exclamations of astonishment, as they processed the momentary experience of the uncanny. It simultaneously was and wasn’t April. One young woman on the staff could hardly stop gasping and laughing. Friends we encountered wanted to discuss how this fetching artifact might be used.

Back before our move here, we’d already learned that the object was buzz-worthy, and like a very funny joke. I expected that people would be amused here, too, when I stood the not-April up in our doorway, to greet the people making the turn toward the neighborhood toward our west.

But gradually, it started to become something bigger than anything we’d expected.

I’d imagined that people would take note, they’d have a chuckle, and walk on by. Soon we learned that more was happening.

Word reached us that April’s cut-out had become a much-enjoyed topic of conversation. People were relating how they’d been so fooled that they had begun talking to the cut-out for a few seconds before discovering that this April was inanimate. Laughter seemed to abound.

When we walked into the waiting rooms for one of the community’s restaurants, we’d be greeted with smiling appreciations of the great thing in our doorway. People would turn to others and ask if they’d seen it. Not everyone knew about this wonderful trick object, but talk of it had swept up a fair proportion.

This cut-out had become a Community Event.

The fact that it had become something so BIG, a couple of orders of magnitude larger than anything either April or I had anticipated, led me to wonder: Why had that happened? And the answer seemed to be a combination of the nature of the Riderwood community and of the particular characteristics of the cut-out itself.

The impact I anticipated would have been the whole story, I suspect, in most “neighborhoods,” where people are more separate from one another, and each would have kept their mirthful responses to themselves, or maybe asked their significant others, “Did you see that thing over at that apartment?” But at Riderwood, the ethos of the place fosters interconnection among the residents. What might have been only a private response became something to share. And each sharing would become an opportunity to share more widely.

It’s like how the splitting of one atom becomes the trigger of a nuclear explosion. Or, to put in in less dramatic terms, the dense web of friendly interconnection among many residents constituted a kind of KINDLING, so that if there’s some SPARK that becomes available, it can readily catch fire.

And if that spark is something seen as wonderful, people are eager for it to catch fire. Whatever can be the occasion of shared aliveness, shared joy, is most welcome.

And then there is the cut-out itself, and why it was just the kind of spark to ignite the community.

The photo from which the cut-out was made really captures April’s beauty. She’s not a beauty queen, but she’s really quite lovely. And much of that loveliness is a beauty of soul: in the cut-out, her face is beaming out a warm and welcoming smile. It invites one in. I quite doubt that any cut-out of a man would have the same effect, male beauty not having the same inviting quality as female beauty—and men having less of a welcoming vibe.

So a smiling and welcoming life-like figure might trigger a sense of the uncanny, and thus create a psychological disturbance, but – it being so friendly one wants to talk to it – the momentary disorientation quickly subsides into sheer delight.

In a place where people are ready to connect, it doesn’t take much—a spark, a smile, even a life-sized illusion—to bring a community to life.