lw lqw wr w 48 5B peeking through the FAIRY DOOR BY OMAR MAHMOOD, DAILY ARTS WRITER Fairy door located inside of Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea on West Washington. There is a fairy door by the box office at Michigan Theatre. I sat in that little corner on a Sunday afternoon, watching the people as the fairies do. A good-looking couple, just a tad too old to be undergraduates, reit4 the listings as they stood holding hands by a poster for Boyhood.He wore a gayly colored shirt and a fedora, and she wore a black-and-white patterned dress with a brown buckled belt. A car revved by on Liberty, its windows down in the afternoon sun, the radio blast- ing. The couple didn't look around at the car. Instead, as if they overlooked the rest of the world, he took her and and twirled her around, and they danced a slow dance not altogether in accord with the music. The world has a way of coming alive when one watches from a fairy door. Old German folklore tells us that once upon a time, in the woodlands, there lived fairies. But more than that is only humble guesswork. Still, I wondered what fairies really look like. And I would trust only my own eyes to tell me. So I set out to find a fairy for myself. As it happens, Ann Arbor is the place for such a quest. The world's only bonafide fairyologist has lived here all his life. Ann Arbor resident Christopher H. U/Daily Wrightbecame interested in fairies in 1993, when the first-ever fairy door appeared in his too-year-old fairytale home on the Old West Side. It had been built into the base- board of a hallway leading to a stairwell - six inches tall and whitewashed, framed modestly, and topped off with a bronze doorknob. It opened up to a checkered floor and a flight of black-and-white stairs. Many years later, The Fairy Doors ofAnn Arbor is now a book published by Wright that documents his fairyology research. It is largely based on eyewitness drawings and descriptions that he then renders, as an artist, into fuller-fledged illustrations. In the book, Wright tells us that imagina- tion is the key to these fairies. But I was more skeptical. My first stop was the storied Michigan Theatre. Underneath the lightbulb-stud- ded canopy, right beside the box office, is a set ofvarnished double doors. It sits tucked away in the middle of the fanfare. Fair- ies are notoriously shy of human folk, so I approached the little door with some trepi- dation. I knelt down and peered inside. The door was hardly ornate, with humble knobs and hinges, but an ode to the Theatre all the same. Panes of glass revealed a picture frame, which I suppose is how the fairies watch their films. I saw a scattering of 'fairy droppings' - pennies, alittle pink hairpin, small golden- brown leaves from past fall, a shiny blue pebble, some M&Ms and a wad of Orbitz. I also noticed a green glitter that I would later see at every subsequent fairy door I visited. I leaned my back on the wall of the post office and folded my legs, my Peshawari U/Oaily chappals not so out of place. I gazed up at the ceramic ceiling, painted all sorts of gold and pink and red and swirled into flowers and ribbons. I hadn't noticed it before, but fairy dust does put one in a ceiling-gazing mood. There was a festival going on that Sun- day as the fall term came around. Main Street was merry. I came to find myself in the original Sweetwaters on Main and Washington. I looked about in vain for a fairy door, finally coming up with the shamelessness to ask the girl at the bar. She rolled her eyes at your twenty-year- old fairy hunter and pointed behind me. There it was: not only a little fairy door, but a dainty little fairy coffee shop next to it as well. As I looked on, a little girl in a glittery purple dress and colorfully rimmed sun- glasses scurried over to the fairy door and knelt down, as her parents looked on. I moved to the side, recognizing that before her I was but a patzer. The fairies were cooking, she told us. I found that her parents had recently moved to Ann Arbor and were excited about fairy doors. They were even think- ing about getting one at their new house, though that of course is best left to the fairies. Their daughter, Adia, agreed very kindly to be interviewed. Five years old, her blue eyes twinkled with delight as she giggled into her mother's ear. With some humility, she gave earth-shattering testi- mony of the time she saw a fairy. It was a girl fairy. "She had pink and blue wings and a pink and blue dress," Adia told me. As we talked, I learned that the fairy had wings. Adia had given her a penny. "We found it in the book library," she continued, this time without prompting from her mother. "They didn't tell people because the fairies get mad., But they told me anyway." Emboldened by the promise of Adia's testimony, I made my way down to Peace- able Kingdom to visit another fairy door. Here the offerings seemed to have been all collected, but that familiar green glit- ter was present all the same. The fairy door's resemblance to the door of the busi- ness is immediate, though the fairies have embellished it with some seemly railings, and built upon the step. These urban-fair- ies have not forgotten the charm of their woodland forefathers, though I would have to ask Adia to be sure. There aren't too many better ways of discovering Ann Arbor than by hunting for fairies. But be careful of what you might find. As I roamed about in search of more doors, I stopped by the Black Pearl. A help- ful waiter there told me he had seen a door close by, and walked me down a couple stores to a little crevice beside Life is Good. This door was taller by a bit than the other doors I had seen, and also a bit ominous. I paced back and forth on Main Street, examining the neighboring storefronts, but the door seemed to have a design of its own this time. And it was a little too hidden. This, Wright believes, could be Ann Arbor's first goblin door. n the corner of Washtenaw Avenue and Hill Street, in the middle of George Washington Park, stands a gaudy paint-covered rock. First brought to Ann Arbor in 1932 from a landfill in Pontiac Trail - unpainted, with a plaque commemorating George Washington's 200th birthday added shortly thereafter - over the past 92 years it has become something else entirely. The Rock, now capital R, is a monument to hundreds, if not thousands, of different student organizations, causes, messages, and last year, a marriage proposal. It's not clear who started painting it or when, though most sources place the start of the tradition at about the 1950s when, according to a 1987 letter to the editor in the Ann Arbor News, several Michigan State University fans painted MSU on it, necessitating a fresh coat of paint over the letters by University fans. By the summer of 1993, the practice of painting the rock had attracted enough attention that the city of Ann Arbor held a public hearing on it to address resident concerns, resulting in a management plan created by then-Superintendent of Parks and Recreation Ronald A. Olson. The plan called for the placement of a trash container, clean up of the Rock's base, and other regulations that are mostly still in place today, allowing the paintingtradition to continue. While the multitude of writing it has accumulated over the years hasn't lent it a lot of physical depth - in reality, the paint coveringthe Rock is only a few inches thick, as found by a Daily reporter who drilled through the paint in 2010-- its significance as a campus tradition both for students and alumni, as well as local residents, is uncontested. Jessica Black, facility supervisor for Ann Arbor's parks and recreation department, said to the best of her knowledge, the Rock is the only object of its kind across the city's parks. She said while the city neither condones nor condemns painting the Rock, its existence brings something unique to the park and that uniqueness comes with positive aspects, such as the fact that both the Rock and the park don't get tagged with graffiti very often. "There's a sense of ownership in painting it, for the college students and high school students," Black said. The city's policy isto remove paint that ends up on the greenway around it. Otherwise, all the paint that makes it onto the Rock is left alone until painted over, usually within the day. Black said she couldn't remember a time, over her tenure with the Parks Department, that anything that would be considered offensive enough to warrant removal had been painted on the Rock itself. Second-year medical student Max Shlykov is the vice president of the medical school chapter ofWolverines for Life, which regularly paints the Rock. The organization works with the campus community and several organ and blood donation groups, including the Michigan Eye Bank and the Red Cross, to promote donating. They typically paint the Rock before their Be a Hero at the Big House event, which usually occurs right before the Michigan vs. Ohio State University football game. During the event, Wolverines for Life and a similar organization at OSU compete to see who can register the most blood and organ donors, as well as bone marrow donors as of last year. "I was like 'Hmm. Interesting,"' Shlykov said about his initial reaction to coordinating the painting of the Rock. "But I knew that it was somethingtraditional, something special, somethingthatkind of gets people's attention." He said for the group, the main point of painting the Rock was to raise awareness and bring people to the event to sign up to be donors. "It's very visible whenever you drive by, it's a part of the campus that gets a lot of foot traffic, it's very noticeable," Shlykov said. "It's a very iconic piece of Michigan. I'm new here, this is only my first year, but I'm kind of finding out the little iconic pieces of Michigan here." LSA junior Tucker Schumacher, who is currently working on starting an undergraduate chapter of Wolverines for Life, agreed. Schumacher, who is a transplant recipient himself, has been painting the Rock with Wolverines for Life since he was in high school. "They had me come down and do that with them a couple years ago, and that was pretty cool," he said. "I already knew it was for Wolverines for Life, so I was pretty much game to do anything to help them out, but it was cool to be involved." "Because it's so big on U of M's campus, painting the Rock's a big deal," he added. LSA senior Saif Jilani, whose organization, the Pakistani Students' Organization, also paints the Rock, said in an e-mail interview that along with raising awareness for the group, painting the Rock was also a great .w experience for him because of the strong tradition associated with it on campus. Last year, the organization painted Pakistan's flag. "Before attending Michigan I was told to make sure I visit the Rock," Jilani wrote. "I feel like painting the Rock is an intrinsic part of the Michigan experience and my time here - would be incomplete without doing it." Fairy door located outside of the Blue Tractor on East Washington Street.