Next-door to our waterfront home was a very popular restaurant called Johnny’s Reef that hosted large crowds of noisy people. The huge parking lot was often full of boisterously drunken patrons who carried their cocktails-in-a-plastic-cup to their cars, to the bus stop, or beyond.
The restaurant’s practice was to poke a toothpick mounted with a little paper American flag into the maraschino cherries floating in the drinks. The drinkers inevitably tossed their little flags on the ground. This littering, combined with the outrageously loud music, yelling, and fighting of the patrons, were the inspiration for the local neighborhood folks to refer to them, disparagingly, as “the Reef People.”
We were constantly cleaning up the litter they left on our own little street, and came up with the idea of saving the little flags-on-toothpicks, just to see how many we could collect; we found them lying in the street as far as a mile up the avenue from the restaurant. This project lasted for the months that we remained in the house.
We were intrigued by the irony of the “patriotism” of the restaurant in decorating its cocktails and the poor citizenship of the littering drinkers, and came up with the idea of putting our collection of flags into a couple of glass votive-candle holders that the same people threw onto our beach, as a collection of “acts of patriotism.”
Sculpture by Dave & Sharynne Wilder – American-flag cocktail favors, votive-candle holders, fabric, yarn.
Part of our sculpture “Conflict Series”
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