Sunday, November 1st, 2009

ROB BLISS

Grand Designs A young Michigan event organizer is changing the face of his city, one zombie walk and pillow fight at a time.

BY JEANETTE HURT
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHNNY QUIRIN

ROB BLISS IS GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan’s most famous college student, and his celebrity isn’t related to his musical studies at the city’s community college. Rather, this 21-year-old has garnered attention for his creative, downtown “happenings.” His first event was a public pillow fight last fall. He expected a turnout of 200 people, max. Instead, 1,000 took to the streets. “I think everyone was surprised,” says a very modest Bliss, who still expresses disbelief at being recognized in public.

Since his first art/community gathering, Bliss has organized two “zombie walks” (he had to restage and enlarge the first one after Seattle took away Grand Rapids’ “world’s largest zombie walk attendance” mantle), a Santa brigade, a community chalk-out art event, a water balloon fight with 20,000 water balloons, and his pièce de résistance: a launch of 100,000 colorcoordinated paper airplanes from the high-rise rooftops of downtown buildings, choreographed and synchronized to a song by Icelandic quartet Sigur Rós.

Though Bliss’ staged events— all of which are completely free and designed to be appropriate for all ages—are announced with a post on Facebook, he’s pretty much outgrown that social networking site. With almost 6,000 friends on his “The Rob Bliss Events” page —and one anti-Bliss page started by some green-eyed classmates called “Enough About Rob Bliss, Already”—Bliss’s events have expanded to the point where he is starting his own Web site, robblissevents.com. “I just wanted to do something unique, original … something crazy that doesn’t really happen in Grand Rapids,” Bliss says. “In its most basic form, I wanted to create something fun that I would want to attend.”

Grand Rapids, he says, is just the right size to get the support needed to pull off these events. “I like that we’re doing fun and exciting things, and we’re not feeling like we’re five years behind New York City or Boston,” Bliss says. “If I lived in a bigger city, I don’t think I would have been able to shut down the city’s main street for the paper airplane launch. We’re big enough that people will participate, but we’re not so large a city that our events are disruptive of ongoing activity downtown.”

Bliss’ next planned event is a surprise for spring. “Stay tuned,” he says.