Sallie Gratch was on a mission. She walked into Flowers Flowers, a floral shop in Evanston, gave a quick wave to the cashier, and made her way over to the tulips sitting in the storefront window. As she leaned in for a closer look she dipped into her purse and pulled out a two-inch green toy soldier, gun raised and at the ready, and planted it beside a flowerpot. She wandered around the store for a few more minutes, nonchalantly poking at the other plants, then sauntered back over to the window and quickly placed another soldier on the ledge.
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“These soldiers are an incredible bonding tool,” she says. “In this world of ours where we all keep so closed to others, this provides an opening for people to begin to talk.” One time, for example, she left a soldier in a restaurant in Coal City, Illinois. “The waitress picked it up,” she says. “And I heard her go back and talk to some other people. She said, ‘Will you look at this? What do you suppose they’re talking about?’ And they were figuring the whole thing out, and it really prompted a conversation. They weren’t sure if this was the Iraq war–‘Is there another war going on that we don’t know about?’ So it is about people stopping. It doesn’t matter how they understand what it means.”
Gratch overheard Conway talking about the idea during a performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last March, and struck up a conversation with her to find out more. Back home she went to the collective’s Web site, mouthswideopen.org, to order soldiers and download labels, but felt nervous about providing her credit card information online. She sent an e-mail saying she’d send a check instead but didn’t hear back until the summer, when she got an apologetic reply from Conway, who promised to ship as many soldiers as she wanted, free of charge. Gratch asked for four gross–that’s 576–and soon began leaving them everywhere.
Handing out soldiers is “the gentlest kind of peace activism” Gratch says she’s ever done, but she thinks that’s the key to its effectiveness. One of her friends, Happie Datt, says she thought going to war was the wrong choice, but doesn’t consider herself the type to “get up on rooftops and shout out how you feel about things.” So Gratch encouraged her to take a bag and try leaving a soldier someplace. Soon after, while out shopping with her daughter, Datt decided to do just that. “We were at Banana Republic or J. Crew or one of those stores,” she says. “So when it came time to sign out, I took a soldier and I put it on the counter. I felt very brave doing it.”
Where: Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation, 303 Dodge, Evanston
