As Sable Adelaide readied to move to Minneapolis from Fargo at the beginning of August, she packed up all the essentials: the kitchen utensils, the clothing, the 1,000 copies of Wedding Crashers on DVD.
Adelaide has been collecting Wedding Crashers DVDs for years. It started when she found 25 of them on sale at a Used-A-Bit secondhand store for a quarter a piece, tossed them on a shelf in her apartment, and asked her roommate to pick out a movie—a pretty good joke for $6.25.
Over the years, the copies piled up. It started as an attempt to fill up one shelf, but Adelaide eventually set out to collect 1,000 DVDs, and when she hit that total last year, she celebrated with a screening of the 2005 rom-com at Fargo Theatre. (That was the first time she ever saw Wedding Crashers; she does not recommend it.)
“I really didn’t want to bring this collection with me,” laughs Adelaide, who actually tried to sell off portions of it to help fund her move. “But I wasn’t able to get rid of the vast majority of it.”
That helps explain why, in mid-September, the owners of Little Free Libraries throughout Powderhorn and surrounding south Minneapolis neighborhoods found their boxes stuffed with 20 or 30 copies of Wedding Crashers. The sudden spawning of those discs inspired amusement, confusion, and yes, a little bit of discord among her new neighbors.
We caught up with Adelaide to talk about the collection, the small backlash to her library prank, and the challenges of distributing hundreds of DVDs on a longboard. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Racket: At its peak, what was the size of your Wedding Crashers DVD collection?
Sable Adelaide: It was probably getting close to 1,200. I had a P.O. box, and I accepted donations for years, and people didn’t get the memo that I was done for the longest time afterwards.
So to answer the question on everyone's mind—how does one come to own so many copies of Wedding Crashers?—you solicited them.
I really did. At first, I was hesitant to start accepting donations, and eventually I just got a P.O. box about the whole thing. So many people were commenting, like, “I keep finding these, can I send them to you?” and I was tired of giving strangers on the internet my home address.
Makes sense. That’s the ideal use of a P.O. box.
I feel bad for whoever has that P.O. box now. There’s this Polish guy who sends 40–70 in one go sometimes.
It’s no longer your responsibility! When did you first think to yourself, “I know what to do: I will distribute this collection to the Little Free Libraries of south Minneapolis”?
Actually, around six months ago, someone hit me up asking for a couple copies when I was doing my initial fundraiser, and they told me that they wanted to fill up the Little Free Library next to their house. I was like, "I think it would be fantastic if I did the same.”
I did try to sell a couple of them—I tried doing a joke rummage sale, where I didn’t really expect people to come by, I just labeled it “huge media sale” and pointed it over to my place. I watched people walk by and slowly realize what was going on. It was a really slow week, I had maybe seven or eight people walk by. It was mostly a good excuse for me to sit out in the sun in my yard all day.
Yeah, and hey, you can meet your new neighbors.
But as soon as I was done with that—I’ve been tripping around [the collection]. I don’t have the most space in my place, so I was like, “I’ve really got to get rid of this. It’s time.”
Do you know how many libraries you hit?
Nineteen.
Logistically, did you do this over the course of an afternoon, just walking or driving or biking around?
Yeah, I attached them all to the back of my longboard, like two boxes at a time, and just went around town. For the most part, not a single person saw me doing it. There was one lady at one particular stop in Powderhorn—she didn’t take them out or throw them away, but I did see, from a block away, she came up to see what I was doing there, and I saw her ruffling through the copies. I came by again after five minutes and she was still looking at them. She was like, “What did I just see?”
@arsongirly I shouldn't be allowed to have hobbies #reading #collector #cinema
♬ original sound - Daryl Hall & John Oates
The fact that you did this on a longboard is somehow even more delightfully absurd.
Oh, boxes were falling off the entire time. It was not a good way to do it. But it was the way I had.
Well for the record, I think this is tremendously funny. For me, it was like a joke that unfolded for me over the course of several days—I saw one library full of them on a dog walk, and then another, and then another… so, thank you for the laugh.
I got invited to the neighborhood Signal chat over this! People contacted me, they saw my video and stuff, and they invited me. Nobody is actually mad about this. Generally, public reaction has been really good. It sent a couple Facebook groups into a bit of a tizzy, but that’s Facebook.
I did want to ask about that. I’ve seen a small number of comments from people saying, you know, “That’s not very considerate. Where do the books go?” And it’s like, well, there was room in the library.
A ton of them were empty. And to be fair, I was taking out some garbage flyers. On occasion, there was some gross stuff. But I cleaned up most of them along the way. Some of them had, just, gross spam where I was like, “This doesn’t belong in the general public's hands.”
As someone who walks around south Minneapolis a lot, some of these Little Free Libraries… let’s say they could use a little attention!
I hope at the very least, people look at them a little closer now. There’s going to be a lot of people who might actually pick something out of one now, and that would be kind of cool. Hopefully it isn’t this movie: It actually isn’t that good. I saw it once, after I hit 1,000 copies, and I was like, “OK, that wasn’t worth it.”
I’ve seen people describe this as a prank, I’ve seen it described as an art installation—is it one or both of these things? Or neither or those things? Is it a bit?
It is 100% a queer art installation. I have full-on trans rights flags with Owen Wilson and [noted Minneapolitan] Vince Vaughn on them. When I had the screening, it was a big trans joy event, and a bunch of people came cross-dressed in different wedding gear.
Some folks have been calling for you to take the DVDs out of the Little Free Libraries. What does the future hold for these DVDs?
I have 69 of them held aside for a fundraiser that I’m running right now, just because I’m running low on rent, and a lot of people wanted one last minute and were like, “Hey, I’m nowhere near where you live now!” I did pick a couple back up; I think I’m going to drop them off at a box randomly, maybe find another Little Free Library. I might just keep them in the back of a car… it might be fun if it popped up one last time.
I did throw away quite a few of them, and a handful of people picked up a couple. And there are some libraries that are still left with a bunch, and I think I’ll leave them there! If people get really up in a tizzy, or if there’s legal trouble down the line, maybe I’ll go pick them up.
I don’t know how there could be legal trouble. It’s a Little Free Library—the point is that you take and leave stuff, which is exactly what you did.
Anything’s better than, like, 15 copies of the Bible.
And it’s good for a laugh.
The community’s been through a lot here, but it’s also a loving and caring community that really needs a good smile every once in a while. This was the perfect place to do it.
