Friday we were supposed to have a volunteer space on Headspace but it was broken and not going anywhere, so we had a day free of commitments to explore and play and do whatever we wanted. What that turned out to be was a slow start and some fun chill time in the back of camp with various friends over at our camp neighbors Deron and Suneeta’s place, and then Mom and Kathy and I decided to go over to our neighboring camp, Kostume Kult, for some free costumes. We’d been hearing them all week with their very loud sound system and often obnoxious MCs talking about the people strutting the runway, but we hadn’t yet gotten around to the whole Kostume Kult experience. What is the Kostume Kult experience you ask? I will share. First we went and waited in line along the edge of their frontage, which looked like a graffiti’d metro car cut in half, and watched people who had acquired their new costume pieces come do a parade down a long elevated runway that led from the curtained back of their frontage up to the Esplanade. Then we were welcomed in groups to pass through a curtain and into a large tented space full of clothing racks and bins on tables and wall clips full of costumes and accessories. A lot of what they had there were actual costumes (e.g. the low quality kind made for Halloween and other costume events that you might find at a Spirit store) as opposed to just fanciful costume pieces, but because burners could also bring things to gift (we didn’t, although apparently if you did you were allowed to skip the line), there was some random one-off stuff in the mix too. After browsing around we all found some fun things to try on, which we did over in one corner of the tent. Kathy found a beautiful long pink tropical flower print dress with little ruffles on the neck and sleeves, Mom found a black gauzy overshirt and a bright pink Mad Hatter soft top hat, and I found a silly “Lady Luck” costume which was a long stretchy green dress with three-dimensional foam dice as shoulders (being a long time tabletop gamer, I could not resist a costume with dice), a gold horseshoe insert at the neckline and a gold chain “belt” with a four-leaf clover, a small foam die, fake rabbits feet and a heart hanging from it, paired with an oversized “leprechaun” green top hat with a fake gold buckle on it. Once we were satisfied with the things we found and ready to take them away, we put them on and exited the tent, where we waited in a much shorter line to go show them off on the runway. It was fun to strut down the runway dancing to the music and doing model twirls; the MCs were obnoxious and loud but generally supportive. Sadly, at some point in the trying on fuss I lost my sunglasses, and even though I went back right away to look for them, there was no way of finding them in all the piles and bins of stuff. (I lost a lot of things—sunglasses, water bottle, buff, earrings, flashlight—at the burn this year, like little aftershocks of the bigger losses I had experienced during the year between last burn and this one. But they were very clearly just things, and though I was sad to see them go, it didn’t bother me that much.)
We went back to camp to show off (and in my case, take off) our finds, and hung around for a bit longer with our campmates, until finally at some point in the afternoon Anjanette and I motivated to go out on another playa art adventure. (I got to spend a lot more time with my bestie at this burn than I had anticipated, and that was a real joy.) She wanted to climb on the giant warthog, which even though it was not spinning anymore looked too hard and dangerous for me, so I declined and cheered her on and took pictures from the ground. She made it all the way to the top and back again with no incident.
One other cool highlight from that set of art adventures was a piece that I later found was called “Doors to Recovery” but which Anjanette and I were calling the Lotus Temple (there was a giant and gorgeous Lotus Temple we had spent some time in the year before, but this was much smaller). It was a room-sized, lilac purple octagonal structure with a conical roof, and a big white lotus flower at the top of the roof. Each facet of the octagon had a door in it, and each door was painted with a beautiful painting and a question above it, which said things like “what makes your heart sing?” or “what sets your soul on fire?”. There were a few fill-in-the-blank questions too like “addiction is...” or “a natural high is...” or “self-love is...”. You chose a door to enter through, and once you entered you realized that (not surprisingly, given the size of the building) all doors led to the same interior space. Right in front of you when you first entered were chalkboard-painted walls punctuated with open entryways into an inner room. The chalkboard walls had the same questions as the outer doors above them, and space and chalk to write your answers below.
On one of them I wrote the same “everything is going to be okay in the end...if it’s not okay, it’s not the end” quote that had become such a theme for me this burn. The inner room inside the chalkboard walls was mirrored and at the top of the walls were two long quotes, one of which said “The lotus flower begins from mud and darkness, finding the strength to rise to the light and bloom its beautiful flower,” which is a flowery version of one of Anjanette’s favorite quotes ("no mud, no lotus") and similar to my own love for the “suffering cracks us open and lets the light in” philosophy. The ceiling inside that inner room was hung with gorgeous pierced-metal lanterns with purple light inside, and the whole thing was really beautiful. It was the perfect art piece for the two of us.
After we got back to camp that afternoon, I don’t remember much else besides climbing up on someone’s RV to look at the beautiful sunset and getting ready to go out for the evening again. We did at some point go over to Moon Cheese to get some late night grilled cheese (our camp had loaned their camp some room in our refrigerator truck so they let us cut the line to get our grilled cheese). So they brought us out a big metal bowl full of sandwiches and we got to nibble on warm grilled cheese while listening to awesome live music next door at Crossroads. After that a group of Pinkies went over to see the Helios burn at midnight, which was gorgeous and exciting and started with a ton of fireworks. It was the first big burn I’d been to that week and it got the burn excitement going for sure.