Friday was freak flag day! With a little help from my favorite art flunkies, I had made around 300 flag blanks to take with me to Burning Man this year, from a donation of beautiful peach colored fine cotton fabric someone had intended to make curtains out of and then decided to get rid of. There was plain peach, peach with polka dots, and peach with stripes. I was scheduled to run a flag-making workshop at Sacred Spaces at 10:30 in the morning, so I got up and got myself ready and around 10, I schlepped my box of flags, bag of newspapers and multiple bags of sharpies over to the “Mind” dome with a little help from my friend Pat. Then Pat and I took handfuls of flags and went out in front of SSV to the Esplanade and started handing them out. Our friend Naomi came by to help hand out flags too. We would hand them out to people and then tell them that there was a workshop starting in a few minutes where they could come decorate them; this worked really well for getting people in to the workshop. At around 10:30 I left Pat and Naomi handing out flags and went back to the Mind dome to start the workshop. I told people a little about the project, and encouraged them to pair off to talk to each other about the things they felt they were freaky for/about/with. Then I handed out newspapers and sharpies and told people to come take a photo when they were finished.
People continued to drift in for the entire 90 minutes of the workshop, but at its peak I probably had about 40 or 50 people happily coloring away on the floor of the Mind dome. I really enjoyed flitting about, checking in and encouraging people, and of course people made some awesome flags (which you can check out over in the Gallery on the FYFFH website. I didn’t get pictures of everyone’s flags (and the ones I did get were often dark and yellow, because of the yellow fabric draping the Mind dome), but I know that I gave away about 150 flags there at SSV, which is pretty awesome!
After that fun morning, I had scheduled myself for a brief massage in the SSV Body dome (where all sorts of healers are available all week long). It was a Thai massage from a lovely man whose name I can’t even remember now (eeek!) and even though it was short (only half an hour) it really was a treat. He worked on my achy foot and legs and suggested yoga to open my hips.
After lunch I went and fetched my other box of flag blanks and put the flag-making stuff in the basket of my tricycle and trundled over to Pink Heart, where I spent the next few hours making more flags with whoever came by. Anjanette helped me hand out the flags this time. It was much mellower over there at Pink Heart, with most people just enjoying hanging out on the fuzzy pink couches and watching the people go by on the Esplanade. But it worked great to just wander around and ask people if they wanted to decorate a flag with us, and then to also scatter newspapers and sharpies around on the floor in front of the couches so people could just come in and sit down and start. I probably got another 100 or so flags handed out there, and took some more great pictures of the flags people made. Even Halcyon came by at one point for a hug and a thank you, which I appreciated. I’m really glad that I did the flag-making both places in both ways—I had a great time interacting with people and spreading the freak flag philosophy. There is nothing quite like the pleasure of working hard to bring something cool to Burning Man and having it thoroughly appreciated by strangers.
Josh came by at one point to visit while I was making flags at Pink Heart, but he wanted to explore more than he wanted to sit around making flags with us so we agreed to meet back at camp when I was done and he left on his own adventure. I got back around 5ish, and Josh was already back, so we decided to blip out before dinner and bike to the other side of the city to see if we could connect with our friends Angela and Chris and their kids, who were staying in Dye With Dignity (part of Barbie Death Camp). We had a fun time biking across the playa, but once we got to the 4 o’clock area, it got way bumpier and dustier and much harder to bike (or trike, as the case may be). We found Dye With Dignity after a bit of searching around, but couldn’t find Angela and Chris. Eventually after some wandering and asking, we found out that our friends had packed up and left Black Rock City earlier that day. We were sad to have missed them, but that’s often the way it goes on the playa.
Friday night we decided to stick around at SSV, because there was a great lineup of music planned. Josh mostly hung around with his build buddies and wanted to watch the visuals that our friend Evan was creating to go along with the music, so I wound up dancing by myself in their general vicinity. I had fun playing with my toroflux toys again, and grooving to the music. We stayed up until around 1 or 2am, but the great thing was that we were right there at home so we just stumbled back to our yurt and crashed out for the night.