Neil Gaiman’s Valentine’s Day Present to His Wife: A Flash Mob

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The St Valentine’s Day Pashmob from Zoe Shacklock on Vimeo.

If there was an international body of neutral judges who gave out “cutest nerd-famous couple awards” it would take a very very cute couple indeed to give writer Neil Gaiman and performer Amanda Palmer a run for their money. This year, the recently married couple’s very different professions mean they are spending a long stretch apart; more than three months, and knowing that Valentines Day would fall just short of the middle of that stretch, Gaiman secretly organized a flash mob of his Melbournian Tumblr fans to show up at the bar she’d be at post-concert and give her kisses from him.

The project was dubbed Pashmob, after the Australian slang for kissing with tongue (although that wasn’t specifically a requirement), pash. Says Gaiman, who watched the whole thing from a live video feed. As for how it went:

She played her gig, then went to the pub beer garden, people went over and kissed her and told her it was from me… whereupon she burst into tears. And she cried. And other people came over and she got a lot of hugs and pecks on the cheeks, but did not get pashed once, because it really obviously wasn’t the right thing to do when someone is crying, or trying not to cry…

Gaiman admitted it was probably the kind of Valentines gift you could only pull off once.

(via Neil-Gaiman.tumblr.com)


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Susana Polo
Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.