Afoot, in the most Fringy way
Three brothers organize a wonderfully strange -- and revealing -- walk on and around the Parkway. Howard Shapiro writes about "Afoot!" from the Live Arts/Philly Fringe.
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
So there we were, my colleague Wendy Rosenfield and her husband, Rich, and me and my friend Steve, walking through lanes in back of the Art Museum, and onto the streets around the Parkway, and pausing at the fronts of buildings and at statues and little curiosities we've passed countless times but never actually seen. (The striking red-roof towers of St. Francis Xavier Church at 24th and Green, one of our stops, bowled me over, on a street I drive along probably 50 times a year.).
We were participating on a sultry Saturday afternoon in Afoot!, a scavenger hunt that is becoming a Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe tradition, developed wittily and meticulously by brothers Aaron, Mickey and Ben Cromie.
This year, it was in and around the Parkway, and here's how it went: You moved in teams of at least four people, with directions and about 25 envelopes with words like "Puma," Bubbles" and "Bankruptcy" on them. Inside each envelope was a (loose) poem of perhaps 20 lines, leading you on a route to discover or uncover answers about the area, and also directing you in strange ways to the cryptic title on the next envelope you needed to continue the hunt. (The envelopes were not in order, purposely.)
You had a sheet with micros of pictures from along the route – what were they? You had to find certain attractions and prove that you did by placing a team member in a cell-phone picture by each discovery. And you had to parse the little hints in the poems to figure out where to go.
It was fascinating to learn the city in a new way. It was also challenging, especially in the 75 minutes called for – I could have done it all afternoon, as other friends in a group ahead of me planned to do, time limit or not.
Afoot! Is offered only one day at the Fringe – too bad it's not more days, and full ones.
