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Quite Content, Despite the Spider Bites
Jun. 20th, 2005 01:26 amTen years now, we've been spending the weekend nearest Summer Solstice at the Free Spirit Gathering, but this year was the best one yet for Dan and me. It's kind of odd that that's so, since Dan was directing traffic in the parking lot for some very large number of hours, and my chronic pain flared up big time. Still, we didn't really have to deliberate at all. Best ever, yep. Thanks to everybody who worked on the thousand things that needed doing. The nine-foot-tall costumes/puppets for the three big rituals were glorious. The rituals themselves had plenty of oomph. (That's a technical term there. Don't ask me what it means. It's...um...oathbound. Yeah, oathbound, that's right.) For the first time in a long time, there was stuff on the workshop/panel program that I actually wanted to go to. It also didn't hurt that the weather was cooperative this time--for once, we got a break from our unfortunate run of torrents and tornadoes.
I keep wanting to write a sentence that begins, "Best of all," but there are too many candidates for the Best Part. Conversing for hours under the maple tree with folks from the more far-flung covens in our tradition is right up there.
But no, best of all was Friday's music. Jennifer Cutting and her new Ocean Orchestra played a lot of her old repertoire from the days of The New St. George. Back when Dan and I were first courting for the second time (Trust me, that's the best way to describe 1992), we'd go out to hear The New St. George almost every week. For us, those tunes are the happiest music there is. The drumming down by the fire circle's a fine thing, but since that goes on for about eight hours a night, every night, the drumming and dancing come to seem as fundamental and necessary as breakfast, lunch, and dinner. To my mind, the pre-bonfire concerts are the real jewels of the festival program.
I wanted to love the Kiva concert, but they brought that dreadful dancer back. I don't mind a band having a shill or two in the audience to encourage dancing, but this one's a calamity. You know that moment in Jane Eyre when the characters you've been rooting for are finally about to get their payoff? When you're finally going to get to see Jane and Rochester overcome all odds, etc., etc.? At that moment, you've been Jane, quite intensely, for many hours, and that is the moment Bronte chooses to smash your vicarious sense of impending triumph with a sledgehammer by making Jane address you as her reader and reassert her position as the teller of the tale. "Reader, I married him," she says, and blammo, you are no longer Jane. You have lost Jane. And then the book ends, dammit. One does not go to a Kiva concert to be danced at. "Alienating" is the nicest of the words I've come up with to describe the impact on the audience. Not the intended effect, quite clearly, and not an effect Kiva's performances ever had on me before they mistook this obstacle for an embellishment. At least Bronte's choice to shut the reader out of Jane's bliss is a choice.
Well, something had to go awry. This year, there was no rain. There were no ambulance runs, even though there were over 700 of us and we did 700 people's worth of bonfire and barbecue combustion. If the worst thing that happened to me was that an exhibitionist who thought she was only stealing the show from the musicians also stole the musicians' show from me, well, I got off easy. No heat stroke, no sunburn, no poison ivy, just two spider bites and some aesthetic disgruntlement.
Okay, enough of that. Time for big painkillers and sleep. I pined for my long writing sessions while I was away. Hooray for Monday, a day of espresso and revision.
I keep wanting to write a sentence that begins, "Best of all," but there are too many candidates for the Best Part. Conversing for hours under the maple tree with folks from the more far-flung covens in our tradition is right up there.
But no, best of all was Friday's music. Jennifer Cutting and her new Ocean Orchestra played a lot of her old repertoire from the days of The New St. George. Back when Dan and I were first courting for the second time (Trust me, that's the best way to describe 1992), we'd go out to hear The New St. George almost every week. For us, those tunes are the happiest music there is. The drumming down by the fire circle's a fine thing, but since that goes on for about eight hours a night, every night, the drumming and dancing come to seem as fundamental and necessary as breakfast, lunch, and dinner. To my mind, the pre-bonfire concerts are the real jewels of the festival program.
I wanted to love the Kiva concert, but they brought that dreadful dancer back. I don't mind a band having a shill or two in the audience to encourage dancing, but this one's a calamity. You know that moment in Jane Eyre when the characters you've been rooting for are finally about to get their payoff? When you're finally going to get to see Jane and Rochester overcome all odds, etc., etc.? At that moment, you've been Jane, quite intensely, for many hours, and that is the moment Bronte chooses to smash your vicarious sense of impending triumph with a sledgehammer by making Jane address you as her reader and reassert her position as the teller of the tale. "Reader, I married him," she says, and blammo, you are no longer Jane. You have lost Jane. And then the book ends, dammit. One does not go to a Kiva concert to be danced at. "Alienating" is the nicest of the words I've come up with to describe the impact on the audience. Not the intended effect, quite clearly, and not an effect Kiva's performances ever had on me before they mistook this obstacle for an embellishment. At least Bronte's choice to shut the reader out of Jane's bliss is a choice.
Well, something had to go awry. This year, there was no rain. There were no ambulance runs, even though there were over 700 of us and we did 700 people's worth of bonfire and barbecue combustion. If the worst thing that happened to me was that an exhibitionist who thought she was only stealing the show from the musicians also stole the musicians' show from me, well, I got off easy. No heat stroke, no sunburn, no poison ivy, just two spider bites and some aesthetic disgruntlement.
Okay, enough of that. Time for big painkillers and sleep. I pined for my long writing sessions while I was away. Hooray for Monday, a day of espresso and revision.
