Marshall Field’s has a motorized Cinderella and Carson’s has mechanized elves, but it’s the robotic man in the frosted window at Mysels Furs and Leathers, 123 S. State, who’s riveting holiday shoppers and lunch-hour office workers. He’s wrapped in a full-length mahogany mink coat, standing on a ten-inch-high pedestal. One by one a dozen people stop in their tracks to look at the man who stares right through them with a vacant, faraway gaze.
Suddenly the man’s blank look transforms into a smile. He relaxes and backs out of the window into the store. A few people applaud, and the crowd disperses.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This is Sexton’s second season at the furrier’s. He was hired last year after he walked into the store and demonstrated a few of his tin-man moves. Since mid-October he’s been entertaining every day from noon to 4 PM and will keep at it through Christmas Eve. He calls himself the Mechanical Man.
Once he’s got their attention, Sexton tries to get them to suspend their disbelief. “What I really try to do is to convince people I’m not human, to challenge their imagination. If all they say is How does he do that? that’s it, that’s a compliment.”
At the time he was modeling in fashion shows, but getting tired of the routine. He had tried to spice things up–“so that I wouldn’t be just another model”–by roller-skating across the stage and swinging across the runway dressed as Tarzan. Then he asked the man he was working for if he could meditate and try to convince people he was a mannequin. The man agreed. Sexton stood motionless throughout the show, and at the end the emcee introduced him. “I stepped down, and people jumped up and ran and screamed and knocked over drinks.” At the next show he moved slightly every few minutes onstage so people would know he was human. Eventually he developed an entire routine for the shows.
He says that a few times he’s been concentrating so hard that he’s actually left his body. “The first time I saw myself when I went outside–I guess it’s astral planing–I was working at Sears here on State Street. Two guys were arguing. One was saying I was real, and one was saying I wasn’t. I couldn’t hear them, and I wanted to hear them so bad that I went out there and found myself standing between. I still couldn’t hear ’em, but I was standing right there with them looking at ’em. And I looked up in the window and saw myself. It scared me to death. I said, ‘If that is me up there, then who is this down here?’”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Philin Phlash.
