sistawendy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sistawendy) wrote2018-05-27 08:39 pm
sistawendy) wrote2018-05-27 08:39 pm
Nun gets a visitor!
Long time no write! Big gaps in this here journal mean one of two things: either I'm feeling down, or I've been preoccupied. This time it was the latter, happily: my college chum H flew up from the Bay Area on Friday evening, and we pah-tayed.
Friday night: pizza at one of my favorite joints, Cornuto. They have Nutella calzones. So wrong, and yet so right.
Saturday: H's reason for traveling here was to perform with her dance team, Twisted Sisters, at the Folklife festival. She left chez moi early to go rehearse while I dealt with a crashed server at work. Eventually I took the bus down and got to see H's team do their "rapper" dance. It has nothing to do with hip hop, and more to do with "swords", or more precisely flexible strips of steel with a handle at each end like those once used to clean off ponies that hauled coal out of mines. No, I'm not making this up. So you got this group of five women, each of whom holds one end of a sword in each hand, stepping, twisting, and jumping while holding onto their swords for dear life, while their "fool" does fool things.
Did I mention that H is 5'0"? And that the fool was a good-sized man in a bowler hat? Disaster failed to strike, but it's definitely a risk. I will grudgingly admit that the rapper dancing was pretty cool. The Morris dancing, though, I thought was meh.
H's team did two unofficial performances on Saturday. Between gigs, we saw a Filipina miraculously avoid getting her ankles smashed between bamboo poles. Also, a nine-piece marimba band made up mostly of high school kids who appeared to come from maybe two families. I gotta love watching a girl of maybe sixteen with an ecstatic face like a German Baroque angel, turning pink from sun and exertion as her straight blond hair flies, heavy metal style, from the motion of whanging opposite ends of a bass marimba. A mallet or two escaped, but they had spares ready to go. The groove was right on. Oh yeah: Nyamuziwa Marimba did not appear in the program. It may have been an unofficial performance like Twisted Sisters that day.
I took H to the Mercury. She'd never been in a Goth joint or tried absinthe before. We rectified that. Splendid! We also watched people. We were home by 0100 because H needed to be in reasonable shape for...
Sunday: The official Twisted Sisters performance, on a stage, which was of course the only time anything went wrong, but the crowd was with them. Much energy. I took H to Capitol Hill for Tacos Chukis, walking around Broadway & Cal Anderson Park, ice cream, watching skateboarders from the shade, and a little book & record shopping. 'Nuther words, it was kind of perfect. We got on a southbound train together, and I bid her farewell at my usual transfer point for the bus home.
ETA: H & I don't get to see each other very often because of geography. I do love spending time with her, though. She's known me since 1985 and may have some decent blackmail material on me, if she can remember that far back.
Friday night: pizza at one of my favorite joints, Cornuto. They have Nutella calzones. So wrong, and yet so right.
Saturday: H's reason for traveling here was to perform with her dance team, Twisted Sisters, at the Folklife festival. She left chez moi early to go rehearse while I dealt with a crashed server at work. Eventually I took the bus down and got to see H's team do their "rapper" dance. It has nothing to do with hip hop, and more to do with "swords", or more precisely flexible strips of steel with a handle at each end like those once used to clean off ponies that hauled coal out of mines. No, I'm not making this up. So you got this group of five women, each of whom holds one end of a sword in each hand, stepping, twisting, and jumping while holding onto their swords for dear life, while their "fool" does fool things.
Did I mention that H is 5'0"? And that the fool was a good-sized man in a bowler hat? Disaster failed to strike, but it's definitely a risk. I will grudgingly admit that the rapper dancing was pretty cool. The Morris dancing, though, I thought was meh.
H's team did two unofficial performances on Saturday. Between gigs, we saw a Filipina miraculously avoid getting her ankles smashed between bamboo poles. Also, a nine-piece marimba band made up mostly of high school kids who appeared to come from maybe two families. I gotta love watching a girl of maybe sixteen with an ecstatic face like a German Baroque angel, turning pink from sun and exertion as her straight blond hair flies, heavy metal style, from the motion of whanging opposite ends of a bass marimba. A mallet or two escaped, but they had spares ready to go. The groove was right on. Oh yeah: Nyamuziwa Marimba did not appear in the program. It may have been an unofficial performance like Twisted Sisters that day.
I took H to the Mercury. She'd never been in a Goth joint or tried absinthe before. We rectified that. Splendid! We also watched people. We were home by 0100 because H needed to be in reasonable shape for...
Sunday: The official Twisted Sisters performance, on a stage, which was of course the only time anything went wrong, but the crowd was with them. Much energy. I took H to Capitol Hill for Tacos Chukis, walking around Broadway & Cal Anderson Park, ice cream, watching skateboarders from the shade, and a little book & record shopping. 'Nuther words, it was kind of perfect. We got on a southbound train together, and I bid her farewell at my usual transfer point for the bus home.
ETA: H & I don't get to see each other very often because of geography. I do love spending time with her, though. She's known me since 1985 and may have some decent blackmail material on me, if she can remember that far back.
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