The brontosaurus, last time I checked, was still sitting out there on the grass, its rock-hard aqua skin covered in cloudy white patches just barely masking blotches of pink, as if it had slithered through poison ivy and dabbed itself with calamine lotion. It doesn’t always look this way, but it has for weeks—for no apparent reason. Then again, there’s really no good reason for a brontosaurus to be sitting outside a movie theater in the first place, except maybe as some sort of ironic commentary: a dinosaur in front of a dinosaur. As with so many things in Woodstock, it’s less a question of why than an embracing of the why not.
Ever since the folks who run the Tinker Street Cinema spotted a guy in Mexico sculpting large-scale prehistoric replicas and decided it would be a good idea to buy one, bring it north and plunk it down at the theater, brontosaurus-watching has become something of a spectator sport.
Unlike leopards, this lizard-ish thing can change its spots—and pretty much everything else about itself—on a regular basis. More like a chameleon, actually, and one that’s really into movies. And cosplay.
In a way that is as much public art as promotional commerce, some clever anonymous creator, or a team of them, or a dedicated bunch of secretive Yippie-ish elves busy on the night shift, periodically apply paint and props, costumes and wigs, to the blank-canvas brontosaurus to perfectly pair it with the often first-run feature showing inside, or to herald some notable event, or to honor some noble effort.In recent memory—and who could ever forget—the weirdly sexy ’saur simulacrum of Pamela Anderson as she appeared in “The Last Showgirl”? Or the marvelously accurate rendering of “Superman,” cape and curl intact? With dark glasses, harp rack, curly locks and, somehow, just the right intense look and superior sneer to hype “A Complete Unknown,” the pale brontosaurus looked more like Dylan than Timothée Chalamet did. Maybe it was the tail. For Pride Month, the statue glowed with a rainbow. For spring and Easter, it was gold-plated and sported a flowery bonnet. It’s like trick-or-treat all year round.
For a small town, Woodstock has a lot of landmarks, from Apple Rock to the Village Green peace pole, from the fire tower up on Overlook to the kitschy Robert Indiana-ish Love Knot on Mill Hill that seems to crave landmark status in the aggressively baldfaced way that Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize. And if you’ve been here a while or are in the know, there are the gone-but-not-forgotten ghostly landmarks of blessed forever memory: Joyous Lake, Deanie’s. They all guide our way, in one way or another, telling us where we are and where we’ve been. The brontosaurus has joined the club, rightly so, and is certainly the most smile-producing and Instagram-worthy of the bunch.
By the time you read this, there’s every chance the brontosaurus will be in a new getup, most likely tied to the theater’s current big feature, the new “Spinal Tap” movie. Take a walk. Stop by. Go see. And, yes, smell the sauropod.
