Welcome to episode 7: The Empty Bench, Part I.
We placed the camera between bars of the gate protecting the garden here from the street, at Park Ave. South near 38th St.
Our mission, and the source of the episode's suspense: to see if anyone sits on the bench.
With its heavenly white paint job, and Jesus' ambiguous stance* -- is He shooting rays of love from His palms, or raising them in warning because the bench is designed to fry the unworthy like vampires in morning light? -- it will be interesting to see if anyone approaches or sits on the bench.
Notice I say "if," and that the episode is labeled "Part I." We filmed for a week, and nothing but birds, rodents and flying litter visited the garden. (Though I see evidence here that someone tracked chalk across the asphalt; did the camera crew desert its post just when something, perhaps a miracle, occurred? It's so hard to find dependable aesthetic help nowadays.)
* Religious statues are tricky. People like to see divinity "in the flesh" -- it suggests they have a chance themselves. But then they invest the lump of stone or plastic with supernatural powers -- crossing the line to idolatry -- and plant it in the garden like a scarecrow. Before long the birds and rodents lose their fear and desecrate the idol, then vines pull it down into the dirt, where it rots in the silent company of countless billions of plastic bottles, dinosaurs and Barbie dolls, disdained by worms and ruptured by roots, its eyes stuck open staring down into hell.
