As I am writing a novel inspired by traffic, I find myself starring at traffic signs and signals. I try to imagine what they are trying to tell us, beyond the obvious. Today, I give special attention to the pedestrian traffic light. I imagine what would it be like if the stick man in the traffic light started dancing. What would that be like. Here is my traffic light animation.

To create the traffic light animation, I video tapped a favorite pedestrian traffic light in my neighborhood and then I proceeded to animate the stick figure walking man in the traffic light. As I started this I thought animating a stick figure would be easy. Well! I was wrong. It is much harder than I expected.

The story is like this. I am walking in my neighborhood when I encounter a pedestrian traffic signal.

I press it and wait for the walking man to appear to give me permission to cross the street. First, the hand indicating “stop” appears. And then the walking man.

Instead of walking he begins to dance for me. Music magically starts to play as well.

What am I supposed to do? Dance along? Learn the choreography? Ignore him and cross the road anyway? What would you do in this situation?