There is a man. He carries a can, and inside it is a weird, cerise hunk of goo the size and consistency of a generous bowl of lumpy raspberry Jell-O.
Each summertime, man and can climb into the car and drive to a lowly town on the edge of the Philadelphia suburbs, not far from where Washington played out that bitter, long-ago wintertime in Valley Forge.
The town, Phoenixville, is a plaza of history, too. Fifty years agone, this position was affected by the spotlight. A small production company deuce towns over made a film that no one expected to go anywhere. Instead, it became one of the iconic sci-fi horror flicks of the 1950s and introduced the world to an thespian named Steve McQueen.
In the movie, this happens: A mysterious lump of extraterrestrial gelatin kills a doctor in his home, menaces teenagers in a grocery store, surges toward a crowd of people in a darkened theater and engulfs a diner.
In tangible life, this happens: Each summer, hundreds of locals and folk from as far out as Oregon and Jamaica come to the center of Phoenixville. They visit the house where the doctor "died," stop by the strip mall where the market once stood, eat at the dining compartment on the site where the outlander met its frozen final stage. And, on Phoenixville's main drag, on a warm summer evening, more than 400 of them carry screaming from the like theater, the Colonial, in a joyous re-enactment of the movie's big scene.
The man and the can play starring roles in The Big Weekend and its ocean of science fiction fans and weekend excursioneers. The adult male is Wes Shank, aggregator of picture show memorabilia. The can contains his piece de resistance, the matter that gave rise to all the commotion in the first-class honours degree place.
It is a toy film airplane propeller, nothing more, a clump of silicone polymer manufactured by Union Carbide in West Virginia. But it is also the centerpiece of a story of tourism and entertainment that, a half-century and six manned moon landings later, refuses to go away.
All around the hunk of guck, something unmated unfolds: Because a picture was made long ago, because a town's gotta do what a town's gotta do, a fete has risen. A downtown has amount back. A past has been leveraged - a fictional past, but a past nevertheless.
Once, in 1958, "The Blob" came from beyond the stars and brought expiry to Phoenixville. Today, scarce as out of the blue, it is bringing life.
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"When you see something that was on film, it takes you into the movie. It's almost care you are a character," says Dave Perillo, an artist from Swarthmore, Pa. He has come to hawk his sci-fi caricatures at "Blobfest," Phoenixville's name for its annual street-fair excursion into the blobosphere.
"These places," Perillo says, "are our fresh historic sites for the ADD generation."
Entertainment can be an unpredictable beast. What appears up on the big screen - some of it, at least - was created in real places. And sometimes, because of the fabrication, those real places begin to change.
In Scotland, an ancient rook has turn a pilgrimage site because part of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" was filmed there. In Dyersville, Iowa, the baseball game diamond carven from cornfields for "Field of Dreams" draws fans who consider it a real ballpark. Mount Airy, N.C., has taken nisus to work itself feel like Mayberry, the quintessential small ithiel Town from "The Andy Griffith Show." And the browning automatic rifle exterior from "Cheers," erstwhile called the Bull and Finch, has renamed itself; these days, it's "Cheers Beacon Hill."
We live in a ground of big stories, in an years where amusement trumps most everything. So events like Blobfest become natural leisure options at a meter when towns need to stand out, to become on-site motif parks and draw tourer dollars.
And here in the cradle of American independence, where real world history is everywhere, why shouldn't fictional history turn something tangible?
"History, the Liberty Bell, the significance of it gets lost of me," says Ellen Plummer of Portland, Maine. "This," she says, "is more real."
She is walking up Bridge Street in Phoenixville with her boyfriend, Rick Naratil, a native world Health Organization moved away years agone. He remembers, at 5, seeing "The Blob" on TV and thinking, hey - that's the field where I watch Disney movies.
While the diner and other motion-picture photography locations draw gawkers during Blobfest, the Colonial Theater is the epicenter of all things blob. Inside, sci-fi flicks play to enthusiastic audiences, and people at the edges of fame like Kris Yeaworth, son of "Blob" theater director Shorty Yeaworth, discuss the intricacies of filming the movie originally titled "The Molten Meteor."
Outside, the blobbery takes on as many forms as creativity and entrepreneurial apprehension allow.
There is the wooden blob cutout that allows you to poke your head through a gob and make believe you're being swallowed by its spiritual maw. There are the actual fervor truck and the 1950 Ford coupe that McQueen drove in the motion-picture show. Outside the pizza parlour opposite the theater, the proprietors consume created their own creamy, oozy garden pink mass, confined to a garbage bank identification number for the moment.
And there is the parade, lED by a 203% surprisingly, and ironically, authentic.
Modeling one's self after film tin be briary; real history can get lost. But it's hard to find a downside in Phoenixville. The sir Ernst Boris Chain of custody is pretty basic. Theater came punt. Community leveraged blob. Business resurged. Downtown got safer. Everybody's happy.
Even now, almost a decennary into Blobfest, a bemusement remains around the enthusiasm generated by the alien-visitation tale filmed the summertime before Sputnik was launched.
"I take the ride. But do I get it? No," Foote acknowledges. "The volunteers wHO work all year, half of them don't beget it. They say, `Why do they come?'"
Karin Williams, who does PR for the Phoenixville Chamber of Commerce, echoes many along Bridge Street when she assesses the whole occasion: A biotic community identifiable by something strictly pop-cultural isn't a bad thing amid the static of the 21st century.
"It puts our little
