Along the way, MacDonald took pictures and videos, and wrote stories about the people he traded with. There was the guy in Maspeth, Queens, who traded a neon Budweiser sign and an IOU for a keg full of beer in exchange for the generator. The woman in Phoenix who owned a half-vacant duplex and traded a year’s free rent for 30 hours of studio recording time and 50 of post-production.
With all the publicity MacDonald got along the way, his quest snowballed. “I’ve had a million people come to the site since last summer,” he said when I first spoke with him last May. “In a month since then, I’ve had a million and a half more.”
MacDonald wanted a house, but he wasn’t just looking for a place on easy street. “I’ve been offered houses by online casinos,” he said then. “I’m not interested in getting a house for free. I’m interested in making trades with people that benefit myself as well as them.” All the same, he was in this till the end. “I don’t have a Plan B. This is all I’m doing. I’m not overconfident, but it’s to the point where, if I don’t trade a red paper clip for a house, I’m a total schmuck.”
He needn’t have worried. On July 12, a year to the day since he started the project, Kyle MacDonald signed the deed for a modest two-story in Kipling, Saskatchewan. He and his girlfriend, Dominique, will be moving out to the prairie province at the end of this month.
The way his quest reached its climax and denouement is even cooler. The first time I spoke to MacDonald, in May, his latest trading chip was an afternoon with Alice Cooper. Yes, Vincent Furnier himself. Clearly, this was his best bet yet. Hell, someone might even trade a house full up for it!
Then Kyle traded it for a snow globe.
His public, the people who’d been attracted to his site in droves by this time and were following his every move, were incensed. “You jumped the shark,” wrote one. “That’s the worst trade anyone has ever made,” griped another.
What they did not know was that MacDonald had a trick up his sleeve. Somewhere along the line, Corbin Bernsen, the actor, had learned of MacDonald’s quest. He was intrigued. And somewhere along the line, MacDonald had learned that Corbin Bernsen has one of the largest snow-globe collections in the world. (“Something like 60,000 of them,” says MacDonald.)
The dude who wanted to hang with Alice Cooper was told that the guitar he’d proposed as a trade was not gonna cut it. Other arrangements would have to be made. “A light bulb went off in my head,” says MacDonald. “I said, ‘This is gonna sound nuts, but do you have any snow globes?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘What’s your best one?”
His best was a KISS snow globe.
And when Corbin Bernsen learned of this, he spake thusly: “Not only do I want that snow globe. I need it.”
So MacDonald flew to Tinseltown, where he traded with Bernsen for a speaking role in an “extremely-low-budget” movie called Donna on Demand.
And then, finally, the mayor of Kipling traded the house on Main Street in exchange for open auditions, which will be held there on Labor Day weekend. Media will descend from around the world.
