Mark Malkoff's Keys to the City Tour A comedy article
by John Hargrave | 10/06/2009 04:59 PM | 3770 views
Mark Malkoff is obsessed.
While everyone has thoughts like, "How many Starbucks could I visit in one day?" or "I wonder how long someone could literally live on a plane?", Mark actually goes through with these things. The 33 year-old comedian and filmmaker has become known for his hilarious real-world experiments like visiting 171 Starbucks in one day, staying in Ikea for a solid month, or living on Airtran for 30 days.
Now he's embarking on his biggest project yet: travelling across the country for four weeks, with the goal of getting 100 mayors to give him a Key to the City.
Presenting someone a Key to the City is a symbolic gesture of honor that can be bestowed by any mayor with a comically oversized key. Usually there are no criteria for receiving the key, which means that anyone is eligible. Including Mark.
Obsessed with the idea of getting as many keys as possible, Mark began writing every mayor in the nation, trying to line them up for his Key to the City Tour. No freebies, he insisted: mayors should line up some type of community service, so that he could earn his key.
Ironically, the city is never locked.
His project is as ambitious as it is insane: to obtain 100 Keys to the City in 28 days. On his first day of the tour, he managed to score an impressive eight keys. The highlights:
York, PA. Mayor John Brenner arm-wrestles Mark for the key to his city. (Even though he lost, Mark still got the key.) He also had to plant a field of daffodils, which seems like an exercise in futility, given that it's mid-autumn.
Harrisburg, PA. In exchange for cleaning up the town square, Mayor Harris Reed not only gave Mark a key to the city, but officially named it "Mark Malkoff Day" in Harrisburg. Banks and federal businesses, however, remained open.
Lancaster, PA. Proving that poop jokes never go out of style, Lancaster, PA mayor Richard Gray reluctantly handed over the key to the city only after Mark cleaned up a pile of fresh poo from a police horse.
We'll be following Mark's progress here on ZUG. For up-to-the-minute news on Mark's keys, follow him on Twitter, Flickr, or at his Web site, markmalkoff.com.
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