At The Intersection of Yoko Ono and Idaho

• Wall Street Journal

Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick McMullanMs. Ono’s anti-fracking artwork at ABC Carpet & Home.

What do Yoko Ono and the world’s largest potato have in common? For starters, they’re the reason I spent Friday night and Saturday morning in the city rather than fleeing by Friday afternoon, as I normally do. Also, the humble potato (though this spud, as I’ll get to presently, was anything but self-effacing) and the cause Ms. Ono was promoting, or rather decrying—fracking—both involve the ground.

Let’s start with the fracking issue, because it’s serious and it’s best to get serious stuff out of the way first. Not to suggest that the party at ABC Carpet & Home—opening night for an installation, “Imagine No Fracking,” that Ms. Ono mounted in the store’s windows (were a lesser personage to have attempted it, the results might be called window-dressing)—was in any way dour. It was actually uplifting, thanks to the talent brought to bear: We were treated to performances by Rufus Wainwright, Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls and Sara Bareilles, a singer I hadn’t previously heard (or heard of), though she shimmered.

Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick McMullanRufus Wainwright and Yoko Ono

I have always been pretty agnostic on the subject of Yoko Ono. While I’ve never blamed her for the breakup of the Beatles, I’ve also never quite understood what her art entails. Is she a painter? Performance artist? Singer? All of the above? (For ABC Carpet & Home, she decorated the windows with posters stamped with messages such as “Don’t Frack New York,” “Fracking Kills,” “Fracking Makes All Water Dirty” and “Don’t Frack Me.” Not that anyone asked, but I think “Don’t Frack With Me” might have been a bit edgier.)

I got a glimpse of the lithe spirit that makes Yoko Ono special when she took the stage to address an attractive crowd that appeared to take both fracking and home furnishings seriously. “Why would we want to make money” by harming people? Ms. Ono, who was dressed in a handsome black blazer, jeans, sunglasses and a porkpie hat, asked innocently. “We can make money other ways. I wouldn’t say a lot of money.”

The line got a laugh for its inadvertent honesty. Fracking, certainly for those who support it, is about money. None of us would argue that a wellhead in the middle of our backyard is more attractive than trees and grass; it’s the cash that’s so good-looking.

I’m just grateful that the Marcellus Formation, where the natural gas they’re after is trapped, ends before reaching my neck of the woods, so I won’t be tempted to sell out.

“Water is life,” Ms. Ono, who owns a farm in Delaware County, ground zero of the New York state fracking debate, went on. “What are we doing messing around with water?”

She paused and surveyed an audience that included Deepak Chopra and Susan Sarandon. “I’m preaching to the wrong crowd,” she said. “The ones that already know.”

Isn’t that usually the case?

Obviously, I was disappointed. Heartbroken is more like it. I guess it makes sense that a real-life potato wouldn’t grow that large. But how should I know? Dinosaurs once roamed the Earth. I’ve seen some massive pumpkins. Also, it becomes clearer each day that, on issue after issue, the East Coast and the American heartland couldn’t be more different. Maybe the soil out there is so rich, the days so hot and the nights so cool and crisp, that a 12,000-pound potato is within the realm of possibility.

I asked a spokeswoman for the spud how much the most stupendous real-life potato actually weighed. “The biggest one ever grown was 11 pounds,” she told me.

Eleven pounds? Eleven pounds is nothing. I recently bought a baking potato that might have weighed as much as a pound and a half. Okay, an 11-pounder is pretty impressive. But not when your expectations have been raised to extinction-event-size asteroid objects.

So then the question became whether I wanted to hang around the city to see a giant fake potato, which I was told would be rolling into town overnight. “We tried to get it to New York last year,” Sue Kennedy, the potato’s spokeswoman, explained. “We didn’t get the right permits. It’s not easy.”

I expect it wouldn’t be. This town is crammed to the gills. Where are you going to put a 12,000-pound potato that travels on a 48-foot-long flatbed trailer? Union Square, as it turns out. But when I reported there Saturday morning, the french-fry material was nowhere to be found amid the Greenmarket’s bustling stalls.

You’d think it would be hard to miss. I rechecked a press release I’d been sent and discovered that while the location said Union Square, in parentheses it added “around 14th and 10th.”

Fourteenth and 10th isn’t Union Square. But I suppose if you’re coming all the way from Idaho, you’ve got other things on your mind—like not getting lodged in the Holland Tunnel, and eventually meeting up with the world’s largest bottle of ketchup. (That happened somewhere outside Chicago during last year’s coast-to-coast promotional tour.)

I hopped in a cab and found the potato, which was causing rubbernecking delays, even while shunted to the side of the metropolitan-area dinner plate, as it were. “We told them we wanted to be at Chelsea Market,” Kristie Wolfe, half of the Idaho Potato Commission’s “Tater Team,” told me. “This is the closest they could get us.”

Ms. Wolfe, an Idaho native, said she worked at a potato-processing plant before discovering a career in social media. “The high school I ended up going to had two weeks off for harvest.”

Tyler Pagel, the team’s other member, and a graduate of Boise State, confided he likes to have fun with visitors who refuse to believe him when he informs them the potato is fake. “We’ll tell them, ‘Go touch it, take a bite,'” he said. “It makes our job a little different every day.”

— http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323735604578436991085873814?mg=reno64-wsj.html?dsk=y