parentheticals.com - Report, Reflections and Robots (Burning Man 2018): Part 2—FYFFH Workshop, Visiting the Man, Serving Ice Cream, Visit from Evan, Campmates Spinning Fire, Visit from Gene

Freaks making flags at the FYFFH workshop

Tuesday morning I got up reasonably early and got myself ready to go up to frontage to do my annual Fly Your Freak Flag High workshop. Since this was the 6^th time I’d run this workshop at Pink Heart, I was pretty relaxed about the process. Mom also was totally on board to help me again so it was pretty easy. I basically just went around to people who came into frontage and asked them if they felt like participating in an art project. For those who did, I explained the idea and gave them a flag and some newspaper to put under their flag and some sharpies, and told them to come back and see me for a pic when they were done. Most people who said yes to the art project took it really seriously and stayed and colored for quite some time, and then showed me what they’d done. Our friend Lea showed up and came and made a flag and I had fun hanging out with her too. (I gave her her playa name too: Kinkable.) She gave me a pair of giant blue googly eyes to wear on my boobs and it was pretty funny. (Gonna buy some more of those for next year’s costuming fun!) She also had a bunch of ribbon and jewels that she gave to other people making flags, which was super nice of her. It was a relatively light year this year as far as number of flags made goes, we probably only made 30 or 40 flags tops, but what we lacked in quantity we made up for in quality.

I cut people off and cleaned up by around 1pm so the frontage area would be clear for the upcoming ice cream service. Josh and Vid and I were scheduled to do an ice cream shift at 2:30, but we had about an hour to kill before that so Josh and I decided to take a quick trip out to see the Man. We walked around both upstairs and downstairs and saw a bunch of great robot-themed sculptures (upstairs) and wall art (downstairs). I particularly liked the robot made all out of driftwood pieces with an open chest and heart inside, and the paintings of different Burning Man scenes with people replaced by robots (e.g. a ranger robot helping a barfing robot at a robot bar, or robots building the man). There were lots of cool things though, and I took pictures of a lot of them so I could remember them later. We didn’t detour much on the way back but we did see a cool art car with a whole brass band on it stop near an art piece that allowed you to play big horns using a keyboard controller and do an impromptu performance/dance party. It reminded us of the time we ran into a brass band on the banks of the Seine in Paris, which was fun.

When we got back to Pink Heart we had a few minutes before our shift so we went back to our yurt. Josh wanted to do some whippets and relax a little, I told him I’d meet him up front. He and Vid were going to be scoopers and I was a server. I met Vid up front and we had a great time with the ice cream service. (Sadly, Josh never showed up...he fell asleep inside the yurt.) Vid got really good at amazing perfect round scoops (it helped that it wasn’t a zillion degrees outside) and I had a great time as usual gifting the cones to the happy people in line. There was fun music to dance to and an enthusiastic, mellow feel to the crowd, which was great. After serving ice cream for an hour, Vid and I transitioned to helping out with bike parking for an hour, which went pretty well. I believe Josh showed up for a while during bike parking.

Once that hoo ha was all over, I went back to the yurt and discovered Josh hanging out with our burner friend Evan and a friend of his (whose name escapes me at the moment). It was great to see Evan, we hadn’t even known he was going to be at the burn. We chatted for a while and shared some air conditioning and snacks and smokes. Evan gifted me with a hilarious “Burning Man VIP pass” lanyard and pass that someone had made, which was supposed to grant the wearer things like a spot on any art car for the burn, bottle service at the burn, cut to the front of the line at the foam showers (which we actually did, haha!), and other ridiculous assumptions, and then in fine print told you about what you’d actually get (dust everywhere, the time of your life, etc). I loved it and wore it most of the rest of the week. Then they had to go and we had to go have camp dinner (vegan tacos that Anji and Ximena made, which I had helped schlep stuff up for in a cooler, and which turned out seriously delicious).

There are only two other things I remember about Tuesday evening, but both were pretty great. First off, there were a few of our campmates who wanted to go spin fire out across the Esplanade (with our sound camp neighbor Trifucta providing the soundtrack), and of course I wanted to watch that. Mom and I dragged chairs out there and sat and watched as Jess, Mona, Cat and Andrew played with hoops, fans, poi and dart respectively. They were fantastic and I really enjoyed watching them. I love flow arts and I love fire and I love our campmates so it was really a good time.

The second thing I remember is that afterwards, we were chilling in frontage (Lea had come back to visit, and Joe Beal was there and the four of us were hanging out by the water bar) when I heard someone say “hey, Supernova.” I turned around and much to my amazement, it was Gene, my first boyfriend ever (whom I haven’t really seen or talked to except occasionally on Facebook or Words with Friends for the past, oh, 20ish years probably). I was certainly surprised to see him but also really touched that he’d come by looking for me. (He said he’d found me on BurnerMap.) We went off to a corner of frontage and had a nice long catch up talk and hang out time. I knew he’d been to Burning Man before, but hadn’t seen him any of the other years I’d been going. Turns out he stopped going the same year I started, but this year he’d been laid off from his long-term job with severance back in July, so he decided this would be a good year to come back to the burn. It felt really nice to see him, and to reconnect, and to remember all the reasons why I originally loved this person 30 years ago, and yet to still feel perfectly happy with the way things turned out. No regrets, only love. Eventually Josh came back by and we all chatted for a bit and then Gene had to go and after a bit more hanging out in frontage, I called it a night too because once again, I had an early morning commitment the next day.

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