Agent Wimpy & Chekov
Lannalee posted a wonderful bit in the discussion forum about a troupe of performers who ... I suppose the quickest way to describe it is this: make havoc and art on the streets of New York. Here's Lannalee's original post; here's the link to the Improv Everywhere troupe; and here's the page about their Chekov performance/stunt. The reason I love this so much is that I have never read a biography of Chekov, and now I've got a crush on him on the basis of the description they provided from Payne's Images of Chekov:
"[...] the actor, the mimic, the clown, who would amuse himself by going to a hotel with a friend, pretending to be a valet, and proclaiming in a loud voice all the secret vices of his master, until the whole hotel was in an uproar. He adored buffoonery. He liked putting on disguises. He would throw a Bokhara robe round his shoulders and wrap a turban round his head and pretend to be some visiting emir from the mysterious lands of the east. On a train journey he was in his element. If he was traveling with his mother he would pretend she was a countess and himself a very unimportant servant in her employ, and would watch the behavior of the other passengers toward the bewildered countess with the wide-eyed wonder and delight. He had the trick of making a walk in the country an adventure in high drama. Everything excited him."What Improv Everywhere did was, they got a guy who looked like the elderly Chekov and staged a reading at Barnes and Noble... and they pulled it off; the audience went right along with the idea that they were listening to Chekov read his own work. In the end they did get escorted out of the store; then they went on to do a signing in the park to see what would happen. Read it, you'll be glad you did.
This makes me sad (as I often am) that I don't live in Manhattan.