‘Though increasingly difficult to experience, ‘The Marilyn Vent’ is a small piece of the Wayside wedged right in the heart of downtown Minneapolis. ‘The Marilyn Vent’ is a subterranean infrastructural orifice that looks like any other but that garnered an amount of social media fame following a post that illustrated a consistent ability to lift skirts and dresses from the legs of those people who chose to wear them. Scripted videos soon followed- people of all genders wearing billowy bottoms and acting surprised when the air from below struck them. It featured as an entry on a fashion vloggers YouTube series. It received a very small mention in Vogue as a local fashion-related oddity.
The trouble was that the vent was located along a fairy busy thoroughfare and the increasingly large crowds of influencers were becoming a nuisance to those business people who had been walking over the vent for years on the way to work and had never so much as blushed or blinked an eye. Soon, videos of ‘The Marilyn Vent’ took on a pointed turn- men in suits walking through a careful social media setup, brushing past would-be celebrities in a way that seemed decidedly un-accidental.
A woman was hit by a car after stepping backward and away from one of these incidents and, mindful of litigation, the city attempted to block and reroute the vent. That same day, a room full of office workers in a neighboring building were found passed out in their chairs and the vent was quickly reopened. Plans for the city’s infrastructure surfaced, looking for all the world like the blueprints of a spaceship from a movie series with deep lore. Nobody could make any sense of them and nobody could quite tell why the vent existed or why bad things happened when it was blocked or even mildly diffused.
Finally, the city came to an out-of-the-box solution: they made the vent smell bad. When that didn’t work at first, they made it smell worse, and by the time they came to the sweet spot, the vent’s stench was so powerful that walking over it risks ruining a person’s clothes.
‘The Marilyn Vent’s’ last claim to fame was the video of a woman determined to remake the first, only to throw up halfway through the process and to have her vomit blown back up at her and into the unlucky people who happen to be around. People don’t visit ‘The Marilyn Vent’ anymore.’
–an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
