Our boldest tag ever – Phoenix, AZ 10/29/08

Arizona State Capitol - McCain's home state

We left Albuquerque late on Wednesday, so we didn’t make it in time for our Scottsdale show and decided to just tag the Arizona state capitol building instead. We did a drive by and couldn’t find a clear line of sight through the trees to the front of the building, and the tall executive tower on the backside was too brightly lit. So we had no choice but to stop right in the middle of the road, right in front of the capitol building and do our most audacious tag ever…on the state capitol in McCain’s home state. We stopped around the corner from the capitol to set up the projector and the computer so it would all be ready to go when we pulled up. Fortunately there wasn’t much traffic at 2:00 AM.

Ever the well-oiled guerrilla tag team, Jared stepped on his computer and had to reboot, and the battery died on my camera because I’d forgotten to charge it. But we managed to get some images with the video camera before a little electric golf-cart-like maintenance vehicle came up behind us. We jumped in the van and zoomed off, but decided to go back to be sure we got a good image. This time our tag went more smoothly and we got off a perfect shot, but a half a block down the road a cop pulled up behind us and flashed his lights.

As the officer approached and shined his flashlight into my eyes, he barked, “So WHAT, exactly are you doing?” I couldn’t muster more than a deer in headlights response, and turned to Jared so that he could do the talking.

“We’re just doing an art project, actually,” Jared answered.

“What kind of an art project?”

“Oh, we just use this projector to shine images on buildings and then take pictures of them.”

“I see.” [Flashing the flashlight into the van and checking out the equipment]. “What kind of pictures do you project?”

“Ummm, you know, just that really cool hope poster. You know, the one with Obama on it?”

Blank silence stretched on for an eternity. Then the officer finally said, “Well, you know, the reason why I pulled you over is because ever since 9/11, we have to be extra careful about terrorists…and, we noticed that one of your headlights was out.

All through the trip, we’ve attracted attention not only for our daring artistic stunts, but also because of a burnt out headlight on the van. This was the third time we’d been pulled over on this trip. The first was when I got a speeding ticket somewhere between Salt Lake and Denver last week, and the second was when Jared was pulled over for the headlight and for going a teeny bit fast earlier in the evening. He got off with just a warning and a fix-it ticket for the headlight, which was very generous of the highway patrol officer. The other dumb thing is that we don’t have the vehicle registration, so we go through this whole act of pretending to look for it whenever we get stopped. “Gee, I thought it was in here somewhere…” Jared produced his fix-it ticket from earlier in the evening and we gave them both of our driver’s licenses.

After a few minutes the officer returned and said, “You aren’t planning to go BACK to the capitol are you?” I smiled and said, “Nope. We’re done.” Then he said he was going to let us go, and we drove off to find some more tall buildings downtown.