parentheticals.com - Report, Reflections and Robots (Burning Man 2018): Part 4—Pink Ride, Adventures with Angela, Kite Flying, Grace, Pink Heart Party

Luckily I was able to sleep in on Thursday, so I did, until around 11 or so. (Love our air-conditioned yurt!) Then it was time to get up and get dressed all in pink for the Pink Ride. At some point before the ride started though a special guest showed up: our friend Angela. We’d known she was going to be at the burn but it was so great that she came to find us. I was super stoked to see her and showed her around and invited her on the Pink Ride, which she jumped right in on like the pro adventuress she is.

The Pink Ride was its usual fun mass of pink cyclists yelling “love you” and “you’re awesome” and other compliments as we slowly made our way to Center Camp, where we parked our bikes and made a big circle and spiraled our way into Center Camp in a giant group hug. We were near the end of the spiral so not long after we made it inside the whole thing broke up into individual hugging, which was fun. We hung around Center Camp for a bit and then Angela and I decided to head back to Pink Heart, with a visit to her camp and some other random fun (snow cones! Awwww yeah!) along the way. It was really fun pal-ing around with her and getting to spend some fun time together.

When we made it back to Pink Heart, we sat out on the patio for a bit talking and making tentative plans for the evening (which in true playa fashion, never worked out). It was still fairly windy so Anj decided she wanted to fly her kite. It was a little confusing to put together, so our campmate JJ kindly came and helped her build it. Then Angela left and I hung around for a while with Anj and JJ helping fly the kite (it was pretty fun). We also went to go see the giant marionettes whose giant table and chairs were set up on the playa very near Pink Heart, and then headed back to camp because it was getting to be time for our fancy camp dinner (called “Grace”). I heard that my friend and campmate Kathy had finally arrived at the burn (long story) and was so excited to go greet her and love on her a little bit. Then it was time for Grace. Josh was cooking so I sat with Mom and a bunch of other campmates and enjoyed being served delicious food (bread, hummus, empanadas, veggie and chicken skewers, dessert) and listening to our campmate Kayt play guitar and sing (she has an amazing voice!). For the second hour I got up and played handpan for everyone (it was hard to hear though...probably needed better amplification). At the end of the evening we had an impromptu round of toasts and tributes to our campmate Nick, who had died a few months before.

After Grace there was a sort of spontaneous Pink Heart party, with Headspace parked out front and lots of pinkies hanging around in frontage. I don’t remember it too well but I have no doubt it was a good time. One thing I do remember (and one reason I might not remember the rest of the night too well) is that we got to play with a Pink Heart-themed “ice luge”, which was an awesome ice sculpture that someone gifted us in return for using our freezer truck for ice storage. It was about 3 feet high, and shaped like a heart stacked on a diamond stacked on a triangle, with a Man carved on the heart and LEDs lighting up the whole thing from the bottom (where there was also a big tray catching the meltoff). There were also two tunnels carved into it in the shape of an “X”, so that you could pour liquid down the top hole and someone could put their mouth on the bottom hole and slurp up the now icy-cold liquid that ran down through the tunnel. We of course wound up doing shots of all kinds of liquor (I had raspberry vodka, if I recall correctly). At a certain point around 1am I gave up and went to bed, because I had another early morning handpan performance at Center Camp the next morning.[Report, Reflections and Robots (Burning Man 2018): Prologue and Preamble]

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