In one day, the day of the Lyn-Lake Street Fair, so many people surround my car that by the end of the day I can barely think straight for all the names I've ingested and all the times I've answered the same ten or twelve questions about the whys, whats and wherefores of my car. That, and I've got a $125 in my donation can. Taking into account that axiom which states that "for every ten attempts at something you get one positive response," I would place my audience that day at, and this is a modest estimate, 1,250 people.

Now we form a caravan. We leave Minneapolis with a dozen artists in some 8 or 9 cars and we head west, stopping first at the World's Largest Ball of Twine in Darwin, Minnesota. We take the town by storm. Or, I should say, they take us. Within hours, word spreads through the entire area of our presence. At the local tavern that night, we rock the town. Let's call it 100 people we touch directly. But then two local newspapers interview us, with a combines circulation of several thousand. Bang!

From Darwin we head to Pipestone, Minnesota, where a grocery store parking lot quickly fills up with onlookers and someone announces that the local paper is on its way. But we hear about a festival in nearby Edgerton, and race against the dying sunlight to get there before the fireworks display. We make it in, but the gang is tired. Several cars retreat to a campground, but Ned and Seven and I hit the fair with our cars and meet several hundred people in a brief half hour visit. The next morning we file into downtown Edgerton and give the whole town a look. Are you still counting? We've only just begun.

Next it's Sioux Falls, where we don't even stay the night. Yet in a brief afternoon auto maintenance visit, we are interviewed by the one of the South Dakota's largest newspapers and a local CBS affiliate television station. The next day in Mitchell I see myself portrayed in full color in the paper's lifestyles section, but there's so much happening in Mitchell I barely have time to look at it. For there, at the World's only Corn Palace, we are being interviewed by print and television journalists. Already, people are coming up to me and saying they saw me on TV in Fargo, or Minneapolis, or Sioux Falls. The word is spreading.

And it must be also be mentioned that between Sioux Falls and Mitchell the caravan of art cars touched the lives of a handful of very special people. Okay, so the surviving residents of Spencer, SD were few, but Barbara and Lloyd and Nancy, all survivors of a killer tornado that practically erased that town from the map were very happy to see us. The world media that had sucked them dry of their tragedy just weeks before had all gone home, but the survivors were there and they saw us and we, most graciously and with empathy, saw them.

An ABC affiliate captured us in Rapid City, rounding out the alphabet soup of TVs old guard. Today we lent smiles to hundreds of visitor's to Wyoming's Devil's Tower, and often did I hear someone say that they had seen us on TV just last night.

So there you have it. I was wrong, Danielle Mattoone. Take that estimated audience of 200 and square it and square it again. Now you have your answer. America is watching, and ART, The American Road Trip of 1998 is touching the lives of one helluva large chunk of Our Country Tis of Thee.

The Tower

The heavy bass boom beats of the mother ship echo through the campground. It's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" night every night here at Ellen's Driscoll's KOA at the base of Devil's Tower USA.

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Last update April 1, 2004