No, this is not a girl in a costume. She’s a Mennonite, a religious sect that is similar to the Amish, except they seem to be a little more liberal. The Amish avoid technology, but I’ve seen Mennonites at the Air and Space museum in Washington. My guess is that they take a little bit of a liberal view on things.

But this has to be super liberal if this is where this girl is performing:

And handing out literature here:

and here:

Here are some more photos of the girls:

Here’s them in a group:

Here are some views of them with the jaded New Yorkers walking by:

I could have thought “oh, look at their dresses, they are so unflattering” or “ah, globalization, look at it here,” but that would be stupid. I just looked at this and thought — this is super sweet. These people are trying to spread the word of god in Times Square and you have to admire that.
They are putting themselves out there for what they believe and I think that is something a lot of people could or would do.

Now for the sarcastic part of the entry. They have to endure being in the Times Square subway station, place of unbelievable array of smells, all of them terrible. Not to mention people who are kind of agitated because the bastard subway system didn’t get them where they needed to go. By this I mean delivering them to 14th street when they wanted to go 125. Ok, rant over.

There was a bearded man, dressed very simply also, who was kind of the leader of this group. He said he’d lived in New York in the 1960s for two years. Because Mennonites are pacifists, they do not go to war, so he came to live in New York to work at NYU Medical Center. Just as an aside, I’ve met people all over the place who say they lived in New York for a time. If I ever go to Mongolia, I bet I’ll find a goat herder who will say he lived in New York for a year.