The corner of Yonge and Dundas in downtown Toronto is a turbulent concourse of hucksters, madmen and silver-tongued evangelists. Buskers make drumkits of paint cans and two-gallon buckets, slapping out an endless timpani roll that serves as the area’s de facto diegetic score. A young man in a threadbare Spider-Man costume weaves webs over streetlamps and crosswalk signs out of sprawling spools of yarn, while an old man who never seems to get any older startles unsuspecting passersby with a sudden booming command to “believe!”
In a small way, it is Toronto’s version of Times Square, replete with radiant LED billboards and swarms of tourists. And it shares with Times Square an important distinction: for the most part, locals do their best to avoid it.
The people you encounter at Yonge and Dundas can sometimes have a benign but alarming intensity — a kind of lunatic brio, flamboyant, but relatively harmless. It is exactly where you would expect to find, say, a shirtless bodybuilder wearing a Santa hat doing pushups in the middle of the road, or a pair of preachers on matching soap boxes engaged in a full-scale theological debate from across a stretch of sidewalk.
It should hardly surprise seasoned Torontonians, then, that this week it was the venue for one woman’s campaign to give out “free hugs” — a brazen stunt, which called on strangers to “feel the love” and come in for a tender embrace. Taking inspiration from the internationally famous Free Hugs Project, created to promote togetherness after the Boston Marathon bombing, the woman was seen outside of the Eaton Centre mall, cuddling one random stranger after another.
If it seems a little reckless, irresponsible even, to hug strangers at one of the busiest intersections in the largest city in the country in the middle of a global pandemic, consider that the woman in question was doing it without a face mask — and that many of the people accepting her offer were doing so without a mask, either. Of course, she did wear a bright-pink cloth blindfold, in keeping with the campaign’s original message of open trust and indiscriminate affection, presumably even for the diseased and infectious.
But the sideshow-attraction quality of this ludicrous stunt, which would otherwise simply be par for the course at Yonge and Dundas, is made considerably less amusing when you think of the risk to public health involved in this caper. There’s a grotesque arrogance to this sort of display that makes all the run-of-the-mill weirdos and grifters of Toronto’s most outlandish intersection seem almost saintly by comparison.
Fake Peter Parkour and the “Believe” guy aren’t positioning themselves to be unapologetic super-spreaders, after all. Yonge and Dundas, and its reputation, deserve better.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
