Continuing on to describe the fairy ball ... you maybe get the sense we spent a lot of time wandering around. This is fair enough, but so much of that was exploring, seeing the sights. The setting made as strange as it was, and the people in such costumes; it had a lot of that furry-event energy where everybody's something. We never did ask FAE directly about their dress, and whether it represented something put together for the event or something they had developed for any great while. We did a couple times ask FAE what they hoped to do, or if they wanted to go on their own, out of the fear that they were hanging on to us as the ride home instead of having fun. FAE has a stoic manner, and I say this as someone with a stoic manner except for roller coaster ride photos; we weren't sure they enjoyed the time until they posted to Facebook about how thrilling it was and how it got them out of a creative slump.
But there was a lot to explore, including events like knights in armor battling it out in the Ring of Fire. Or the fire-eater, rolling flames out onto their arm or tongue or palm in this ongoing acrobatic experience. The dance floor, which split its time between vaguely fairy-tale-Europe music and demonstrations of kung fu dance/body movement (including from a six-year-old repeatedly introduced as the midwest's grand champion, I assume in their age class) and wedding party dance, pulled us in near the end of the night. This as they handed out foam tubes with flickering LED lights inside and I tried to not be embarrassing. (The organizer, explaining this as part of his connection with the Grand Rapids Swing Dance group, also taught the ``Polish line dance'' which he explained every time was not Polish and not really a line dance, as the line is a pair of circles dancing against one another. It looked fun enough.)
One moment that stood out for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger was the dragon dance. Part of the kung fu school's work was bringing in your classic long dragon puppet, and calling up two groups of nine people each who would get one brief instructional session and like ten minutes of practice time and then go head-to-head in competition. bunnyhugger volunteered and was put in the first group, getting to put her old marching band instincts for synchronized --- and, more important, for delayed synchronized --- movement that not enough of the other participants had. Also to discover how badly her jackalope mask clashed with waving something over her head. For the actual demonstration she handed the mask to me. But disappointment came after her group's demonstration: they didn't have time for the second group of dragon dancers to go on, at least not right now but stick around, maybe later in the night. (They never did, and there would be no getting the group back together once they'd split up. It was hard enough getting the two nines to not drift apart during the organized moment.)
Another high point was FAE introducing us to some of their friends in the fairy-party community. I felt a little awkward at hearing their names --- that sounds like it's against theme to not at least be cagey with names, right? --- but it was, besides a chance for everyone to admire one another's outfits, a chance to meet some of FAE's friends from the part of their life that isn't pinball. Being worth someone's trust like that is a big moment and I don't know that I could express to FAE how good I feel to be worth that trust, but they probably know it, intuitively if nothing else.
So I think I'll leave that as my closing thought for the night. It won't surprise anyone who knows me even slightly that we did stay through the end of the event, and maybe a few minutes past to see the tiniest bit of cleanup and the transition of the dance floor entirely to wedding party. We stayed long enough the natural traffic jam of everyone lined up on the road behind us was able to clear, and we got home with nothing worse than one missed turn.
I was stunned that this was the first time they'd held and event like this. It was all so smooth and so full of things to do --- at least from our perspective --- it felt like something with a good history and a lot of learned lessons. Of course it might be that the organizers were bringing experience with similar events to a new one, and it might be that things were nearer chaos than I perceived. All I can say with certainty is it went great. Glad to have been.
And now on the photo roll it's holiday pictures again. This time they feature a precious bunny and how he spent a portion of the day:
Of course it wouldn't be Christmas without gifts for our pet rabbit who doesn't know why he has to be moved from his nice cozy home to somewhere else in a car. Here, he asks me why all this is happening and why bunnyhugger didn't stop it.
How can you disappoint a happy, curious boy like this?
And here's his gift: a thing to chew! He needed a little encouragement to start chewing because Roger was really not a very chewy rabbit; he'd eat food, and hay, but not other stuff.
Here we finally waved it in his face enough he got the hint that if he didn't chew it he was never going to have things stop being waved in his face.
He's freed his present! A veggie and a fruit 'pie'. bunnyhugger pauses to congratulate him with a quick mind-meld before opening the pies up.
And here is eating the fruit 'pie', an ice-cream-cone dish with dehydrated fruits in it.
Trivia: Based on the United States population as of the census of 1790, and the constitutional provision that there not be more than one Representative for every 30,000 people, the third Congress of the United States could have had a theoretical maximum of 120 in the House of Representatives. (The first Congress, per the 1787 Constitution, was set at 65 members, and the second grew to 69.) Source: The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, From the Ancient World to the Modern Age, Andrew Whitby. (The third had 105 representatives and one non-voting delegate, from what would become Tennessee.)
Currently Reading: His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine, S C Gwynne.
