The average New Yorker hardly pays attention to what vehicles pass on the road. Traffic is considered just another hazard in the life of a metropolitan pedestrian. But some transports make themselves impossible to ignore, and on a Saturday night in Manhattan’s St. Mark’s Place, a bus named Glinda stands out among the cityscape adorned with a pink couch affixed to the roof, colorful string lights on the interior and enough hats, exotic sunglasses and stuffed animals to make the most tunnel-visioned passerby stop and stare.
Glinda the Good Bus’s owner, Michelle Joni, of Brooklyn, is sitting on a glinting yellow couch dressed as if she’s trying to outdo the bus’s panache. After dropping off one party on St. Mark’s, she’s preparing to head back to Brooklyn to pick up a group of 16 people who had rented the rolling venue out for the night. It can be tiring work she said, as there’s some days when she plays host to four bus parties in a day.
The bus’s decor, according to Joni, is an expression of her aesthetic and her life philosophy, and partly by the desert Burning Man festival. In some ways, she says, Brooklyn and the Bushwick neighborhood have similarities. “Black Rock Bushwick,” she calls it at one point, in reference to Black Rock City, where Burning Man is held in Nevada. Against an industrial backdrop on a dreary day in December, the bus appears suddenly on a scantily-trafficked street near Bushwick Avenue as if it’s just arrived from the future, drawing stares from passers-by.
On the Saturday in Manhattan, Joni’s friend Andi is helping her out with the party tonight and as Joni gets behind the wheel of the refurbished model-year 1998 school bus, Andi yells over the bass-heavy music thronging from the speaker to ask about what type of drinks they should mix tonight. It’s a welcoming environment as it rolls through the most densely-packed part of New York, and Joni will let anyone on, if they only ask. She says she won’t invite people who only stare or take pictures, honoring a principle of “reciprocal energy.”
As the bus tumbles through heavy traffic in Lower Manhattan, a group of twentysomethings asks to come aboard, fascinated.
“What is going on?” “What is this?” they ask with genuine curiosity and wonderment as they climb aboard.
Andi invites them to sit and one of them, who said he’s visiting from Virginia, asks a writer to take a photo of them on a disposable camera. After riding for a few blocks, they depart, saying they’re heading the other direction.
It’s a testament to Glida’s ability to disarm an observer, to force them to play by the bus’s rules once they’re onboard. Everyone she comes across is enchanted. Even a delivery driver on a scooter knocks on the door at one point to say hello, and asks if Joni and Andi remember her. Another man knocks, asking if the bus is the same one as in a video he has pulled up on his phone.
“I consider myself a culture maker above all,” Joni said while behind the wheel. She’s also a musician and, in 2015, attracted significant media attention for starting an “adult pre-school.”
While we roll toward Brooklyn, a police car begins to follow. Joni pulls the bus over and both she and Andi get out separately to talk. In the end, the police were mistaken in thinking the bus’s registration was expired. All is well, the police move on and Glinda’s neon lights are roaring through the congested streets again, moving toward Brooklyn. At times, it has the vibe of pregaming a party, and Joni and Andi put on makeup and offer this reporter stickers and glitter.
Driving over the Brooklyn Bridge while sitting in the pink couch on Glida’s roof is a New York bucket list item a writer never knew he had. Up here, you are royalty, the city is your kingdom and each passing car and subway are likely filled with people wishing they were you. The bus’s charms are partly a testament to the welcoming party atmosphere Joni and Andi masterfully cultivate and partly due to the sense that a rider must make the most out of one’s brief time on a bus like this. Your on New York’s most exciting mode of transportation, after all.
On a weeknight in January, Joni wanders through a play center in Brooklyn looking for a place where she can conduct a Zoom interview with the reporter with minimal interruptions from her toddler. She settles on a ball pit.
“The bus, to me, is a lot of things,” Joni says. “It’s my mobile front porch, in some ways. It is a portal. It’s a liminal space, it has become a party bus that people book all the time. I get inquiries every day so it’s kind of like a celebration bus. Kind of, whatever you want to do, wherever you want to go, Glinda can take you there.”
For Joni, the bus is also a “corner office” and her “vantage point of the city” as well as a way to express her aesthetic and philosophy without talking about them out loud. It is also, at times, an everyday vehicle to drive her child to school or to the supermarket, she said.
She procured the bus, originally, from a New Jersey Craigslist ad with the intention of using it for a music tour that she had booked and an end destination of Burning Man. However, “Glinda nicely let me know, or scathingly let me know, that she is not down for that sort of travel,” Joni said. The bus never made it past Pittsburgh, but Joni said she eventually made it to Burning Man that year.
“Now I don’t need to go to Burning Man because Burning Man don’t need more Burning Man. But New York City needs Burning Man so I bring Burning Man to New York,” Joni said. While behind the wheel of the bus, she says she’s a New York City resident for life now, opining that no other place can match the variety of experiences the city can provide.
She returned to the city in the summer of 2020 and Joni and the bus became regulars at demonstrations that occurred in that year in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the bus served as a place for protesters to rest and hydrate.
Joni was first inspired by friends who had buses and said she reached a point where “I needed a bus.”
“When people ask me ‘should I get a bus?’ I’m like ‘you have to be miserable without a bus first.’ Then you will earn a bus,” Joni said.
The bus’s extravagant decor is partly inspired by Burning Man, and Joni said she calls Brooklyn, and especially the Bushwick neighborhood, the “Perma-Playa,” a reference to The Playa lakebed in Nevada where the festival is held.
There’s no hour of day when the bus can’t be running, Joni said, and the rate is the same to rent a ride regardless of which of the five boroughs. She said she does charge more to go to New Jersey, however. This is ironic, she said, since she is a native of the state, hailing from a family which runs the longest-running Beatles festival in the country. She studied early childhood education in college before switching to fashion merchandising. She worked for a time in the fashion industry and later worked for a spa company writing about different spa treatments, alongside various projects such as the adult pre-school and, at one point, a “skipping club.”
“I’m a continuing creator of modalities and philosophies and ideas to bring people into their whimsy and open people creatively, spiritually,” Joni said. “I’m here to lead a play revolution.”
