Marie Gauthe-Joseph drives around with a large plastic box full of rocks in the trunk of her car. And in her purse.
She has delicately painted each rock with a variety of designs — quirky pets, mermaids, colorful faces, hearts, cartoonish insects, flowers, and whimsical birds with giant eyes.
Left here and there in the course of an ordinary day, when she’s going to the grocery store, or to a doctor’s visit, or just during a work break around Sola Salon Studios in Metairie, where she’s a hairstylist. She leaves them at ATMs, or curbsides in strip-mall parking lots. Obvious, maybe, but it depends on someone being curious enough to pick it up — or present enough to even notice.
“I drop a rock everywhere I go,” she said…