Wednesday it was Josh’s birthday, and we decided to take the morning to go tour some of the big art on the playa. We got ourselves dressed, caffeinated up and grabbed our bikes and went out into the mild and beautiful playa morning. We started out close to Pink Heart and then headed out via the serendipitous “what’s THAT?” factor towards the Temple, because I had a delivery to make to the Temple for my friend Eileen (she gave me a big box wrapped in rainbow paper, full of something she wanted burned). We saw all kinds of great art, some of which I remembered to take pictures of and some I didn’t: giant mosaic daffodils, a laser cut wooden alligator head, the infamous Hug Deli (at which I tried a gangsta hug), a twisted wooden tunnel you could bike through, a giant sculpture of the word “INSANITY” (which we’d seen last year), a clutch of big lacy golden polyhedrons, a giant antlered skull with stuff inside it, an enormous climbable human-powered merry-go-round, a giant welded octopus-ish bike rack installation called “The Racken” and miscellaneous wacky art cars. Eventually we made it over to the Temple, and after finding a good place to leave the rainbow box, we explored the Temple complex a little and left our own offerings there to be burned up and set free/empowered. I wrote two things, one a wish for healing for some friends of mine who were currently going through illness or grief, and one a wish for myself: “May everything that holds me back or hides my light be burned away. I will be a supernova.” I also left a freak flag with the words “Fly Your Freak Flag High” tucked into the decorative fence that enclosed the Temple complex.
After the Temple we headed over to Embrace, the giant wooden busts of a man and woman embracing that was nearby. Embrace was made by the same people who had made one of my favorite pieces of playa art in previous years, the sunken pirate ship, and I loved this installation nearly as much. It was thoughtful in concept, emotionally resonant and interactive on many levels. You could go inside each bust and see the giant heart that hung inside each chest, and then climb up stairs and go down hallways until you reached the viewing platform up inside each head, where you could look out the eyes and view the playa from two stories up. We did that inside the woman’s head, and I used a sharpie to write a “JD + JA TLA” heart on the inside because I wanted to empower that through fire’s release too. The craftsmanship and attention to detail in each one of the busts was amazing (though I didn’t go all the way up into the man’s head, because the stairway was really steep and I was tired after going up into the woman’s head) and the whole installation was really moving. Josh and I took some sweet pictures together while embracing in front of the sculpture (they had cleverly provided a platform for people to do just that, painted to say “Embrace Photo Spot”). Yet another instance of a love moment during a love filled burn.
After spending a good long while at Embrace, we headed over to the Tower of Babel installation, which looked like a big mosque with a golden dome from the outside, but inside was a gorgeously sculpted library. The library was full of handmade books with handmade paper. Participants could add their own bits of wisdom (or babble) for others to read. I looked through some of them, but didn’t spend a lot of time reading because we were in more of an itchy “see all the things” mode. I did have my sharpies with me though so I added another “JA + JD” heart to one of the books, and then in another I wrote one of my favorite quotes, the one from Dr. Seuss that says “Do what you want, and say what you feel, because those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter”, plus a “Fly your freak flag high!” for good measure.
After that we went over to a volcano art installation called “Paha’oha’o”, which means “transformation” in Hawaiian. I was excited to see this project because I supported the project on Kickstarter and I wanted to make sure we visited it before it burned on Thursday, plus other people had been talking excitedly about the slide inside it and I wanted to experience it myself. It was basically a big slide covered on the outside by a volcano-shaped structure that was “skinned” with burlap bags. 
You grabbed a burlap bag from a loose pile of bags at the foot of the sculpture, and then climbed with it up a set of steep wooden stairs on the outside of the volcano until you reached the top. Then while other participants down below banged on a big drum, you “sacrificed” yourself by sliding on that burlap bag down a nearly-vertical drop that smoothed out into a horizontal slide, and emerged transformed. The moment of dropping into the hole was definitely scary and required a moment of courage to overcome, but that just made the rest of the slide more exciting. Josh and I both sacrificed ourselves and emerged transformed by that experience of screwing our courage to the sticking point and jumping out into the unknown.
After courageously transforming ourselves, we felt ready to approach the Man again. So we rode over to the Souk and spent awhile appreciating the art (especially the big surrealist painted murals scattered throughout the Souk) and visiting the exhibits. The first one we saw turned out to be another of my favorites of the burn, the “Bizarre Reflection Correction”, which was full of mirrors that showed you your “true” (e.g. non-reversed) reflection, instead of the traditional reversed reflection we are all so used to seeing. It was a great idea for an exhibit that worked on many levels, both physical and metaphorical, and it was nicely executed. I spent a little time talking with the artist and telling him how much I appreciated the exhibit.
We also visited the “Burnerwood” exhibit (put on by the Los Angeles regional group) and got to act out a few lines from the Princess Bride, which was fun because that’s one of our favorite movies. I also got to spin a wheel and in return for singing/acting out “I’m a little teapot” (which I choked on some of the words for but which turned out entertainingly anyway) I got to go make a tie-dyed pink and white silk scarf, which was fun. (Sadly, I tied that scarf to my tricycle basket and it got caught in the wheels and got bike chain grease all over it, so now it’s a pink-and-white-and-black scarf). We went to the exhibit of the Minnesota regional, where we chose from a menu of mysterious experiences and wound up learning how to tie knots, and to the New Orleans regional where we got to leave a prize and take a prize from a set of drawers (I left a Pink Heart sticker and took a little stoppered plastic vial which I wound up putting some playa dust from our camp in). There was a bunch of other stuff too, I’m sure, but those are the ones I remember.
After we had our fill of the Souk we headed back to Pink Heart, where we finally motivated ourselves to go take a shower (yay!) Once we were clean and dressed again, we spent a little time hanging out in front of our yurt, and then I went up to the Pink Lounge and spent some time serving ice cold cucumber water to thirsty playa pilgrims who came by. Just like serving ice cream the day before, it was really satisfying to be able to give something so simple, yet so appreciated, to people who needed it. After a few hours of doing that, though, I was tired again and went back to the yurt for a nap.
After dinner it was time to get all glammed up in our white outfits and head out to the white party at Opulent Temple with Anjanette and our campmate Manamana (yes, like the Muppet song). I was really excited to wear the long white “feather” vest I’d made for the occasion (this was a pointier, white version of the scaled green dragon-ish vest I had made the year before). We stopped at MoonCheese on the way over, which I’d heard about in years past but finally got a chance to try. MoonCheese is a camp with a really simple concept: they make grilled cheese and serve it to passersby every night after 10pm. Their camp was right next to a camp with a big live music stage, so you could stand in line for grilled cheese while grooving to live music and talking to random strangers...pretty fun.
After fortifying ourselves with melted cheese and toast, we walked over to Opulent Temple. We found ourselves a spot in the crowd and danced for a while. The floaty white jellyfish on poles made an appearance, which was fun, and we tried to get a groove on, but at some point Anjanette and Manamana left and when we tried to go find them, we couldn’t. By that point Josh wasn’t feeling well and we decided to bail on the white party and just go back to camp. We detoured to the porta potties first, but then headed back to Pink Heart, where we spent a little while out front sleepily sitting around and then gave up and went to bed.