Paul Kane is walking across a a big chunk of Australia for charity. Seems altruistically normal enough. Thing is, he’s doing it in a Trooper suit.
When people started to send me links about this via Twitter or email (or even a co-worker over my cube wall) that there was this guy doing this thing in a Stormtrooper suit and did I know about it, I had one of those gut wrenching “I should have/could have thought of that” moments.
Sort of like seeing the trailer for “The Beginners” (wow a movie about a dad who comes out of the closet – the same idea I’ve had in my head for the last 10 years or so).
Anyway, so I started to think hard about how I could plus this up if I were to do something with my suit:
Just steal borrow the idea. Nothing is new – there are no original thoughts. One might argue that our Aussie boy got the idea from Terry Fox. Yeah! Where’s your originality now, Mr Kane? Huh?
Then the whole logistics of doing something like that comes into play. How am I going to pay rent if I take the (approximately) 3 years it would take for me to walk across Canada? I doubt I’d have a husband to come home to, as well. So no, short and sweet seems to be the tonic.
Do a different kind of strenuous activity. Basically wearing a trooper suite more than 30 min in this summer heat would result in me fainting like a Dickensian character. So that’s particularly limiting. Unless I do something in the fall/winter. Then I would need a Snowtrooper suit.
I thought of maybe climbing the tower but since Joe Eppele was denied the right to do so in a Sasquatch suit, then that’s out of the question.
Any ideas?
10 thoughts on “That I Could Do”
if you go with your own event, you have to generate all the attention on your own, something that would likely attract fewer or lesser sponsors. attaching to something established and well-known lets you use their machine as you need to (instant press and credibility, etc.) but going untethered has advantages as well. i’d say don’t rush into anything – take some time and survey the official events, decide if one has what you want, and in the meantime work on your own thing. it’s not the weather to go marching about in gear anyway, so look at a fall date.
maybe you could use this as a vehicle to attack rob ford and his right wing sycophants. walk the path of the 1981 riot, and continue along to city hall. that might not suit your intent, but it’s been on my mind lately. or walk to rob ford’s cottage and shit on his bed.
SharkBoy… That I could do!
Postbear: getting close. I like the sponsorship idea but I would have to come up with an activity – I thought about walking Yonge Street…?
How about 2 STORMTROOPERS visiting ALL the Disney Parks around the world?
damn it, i forgot: you could then auction off the whole suit, if it was a big hit and you could raise lots of $ that way, or offer to let it stand in the offices of the charity you go with and let people take photos of it for a week or so. i’m not saying you want to sell it, but if it seems like you can get stupid money for it, do so, and you can deal with the charity to cut you a fraction of the sale to get yourself another one. at the very least, make sure you get whoever does the logo painting to include a strip and repaint job after all is said and done as part of their donation – which they get for doing all the other work as well, in order to have their logo prominently displayed.
how about you collide a few memes and pick some charitable event (walk for cancer, AIDS walk/run, any other thing) and sell advertising space on your suit? solicit local businesses for contributions, and for $n they get their logo splashed across a section of your suit (location and size of logo varying the price). you’ll have to officially register with the charities, of course, and probably let their PR people help you out some (and handle the calls from bigger businesses who’ll want to know you’re legit). in addition, you can offer the business and charity traffic from your blog, your flickr shots, and assure them that you’ll photodocument each and every logo and make them available.
it might be a good idea to find as a sponsor a local signmaker or some such who can render the logos on an uneven surface. you’ll have to figure out how to delineate sections of the suit as well, so you don’t look like a hot mess nascar-transformer thing. and please, get a porn store or the stag shop or a bathhouse to buy the crotch and butt.
Gay Stormtrooper Porn. And sell it. I’m sure people would buy it!
There’s a hotel here that sometimes lets people rappel down for charity. Maybe there’s something similar nearby.
Or you could just guard something.
A Starship Trooper suit??
If Sharkboy drove the support RV then you would be together and there would be no rent to pay.
Ps. The Beginners looks charming.
how about the same kind of idea as Monty Pythons climbing Uxbridge Road but in Storm Trooper gear…