Atena Danner sat on the lip of a white plywood booth in the Chicago Cultural Center’s GAR Rotunda, explaining to a young ponytailed woman that it really is possible to have an orgasm while giving birth. “You’re basically working with the same equipment under not dissimilar circumstances,” said the 23-year-old labor assistant and health educator, who had decorated the frame of her booth with a swatch of pink fabric and a sign that said “Doulas Rule.” “You generally don’t see it in hospitals. It tends to be more of a home-birth kind of thing. I was telling someone about it earlier, and a woman walked by and said, ‘I had one of those.’”
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Together the booths constituted “Ask Me!,” a “performative collage” created by a group of artists calling themselves Chicago County Fair. The collective specializes in interactive projects designed to bring together people who normally wouldn’t interact, according to CCF member Laurie Jo Reynolds, who mounted a version of “Ask Me!” at the School of the Art Institute in 2001. “Every one of us is an expert in some way and is curious in some way,” she says. “But it takes some kind of interface to fulfill those needs. It seems like such a radical act to talk to a stranger. There’s no place to have a conversation like that. That’s why we love booths–they make that act possible in a lot of different contexts.”
When the event began at noon, traffic in the rotunda was slow, so Reynolds donned a sandwich board and, with several other volunteers, hit the downstairs cafe and the street to recruit visitors. A wide range of passersby, including tourists, students, and several homeless people, took the bait and came upstairs, where the artists provided them with macaroni and cheese, cookies, lemonade, and a list of icebreaker questions. Across the room from Danner, the Reverend Bill Lovell, 88, sat on a chair in front of his cubicle–“I had to get close to people”–and talked about his experience as a conscientious objector during World War II. At one point, he said, an older couple had asked him if he’d have gone to jail rather than to war if he had known at the time what was happening to European Jews. “That,” he said, “was a difficult question.”
The CCF folks hope to bring “Ask Me!” to block parties and small towns this summer, provided they can get funding. “We want to go to places where we can get a bunch of different people as close to their own living and working spaces as possible,” says Reynolds. “We’d like to do it in smaller places, where people might not have collisions with these issues or individuals.”
