Little kids in sparkly pig suits!
When you live in the Bay Area you get a lot of different organizations fighting for time during a very few weekends over the Chinese New Year, and some of these organizations inevitably get their events scheduled on weekends to either side of the actual holiday.
I played cymbals. I remembered the beats. Go me!
It was so much fun. It took forever to get started, but the weather was great and we waited in a park with all the other groups and and even though it was a very short parade there was a pretty big list of entries, including a bunch of other lions. White Crane brought a couple of lions and a dragon--all B or C teams, but they're so good and everybody was so mellow that it didn't matter. Another school actually put on a quickie little lion dance with benches and everything as a "rehearsal," though I think they were showing off. And they looked good. Not a tremendous amound of acrobatics, but the head and tail were really in sync and sometimes you could believe the lion was really a lion, batting its eyes and grooming its paws. Very nice. I was helping out because my kung fu brother Steve had divided loyalties; he teaches lion dance at both a kwoon and an elementary school, and he needed people to fill in for the kwoon because he was drumming for the elementary school team. The little kids in sparkly pig suits were with his elementary school and his wife Wendy was wearing a pig hat. Only Fudge is cuter, I can tell you.
The parade itself was only about five blocks long but they didn't have a permit to completely stop traffic so we got stuck at major intersections. The kids straggled along, looking less that professional and whacking the ground and each other with the flags they were supposed to spin, even though none of them had learned staff yet and didn't know how. (This school has a lot of very young kids.) We got to the other park and it was like dropping ink into a glass of water--we all diffused into the crowd and swirled about, enjoying the sunshine and the happy crowd, and even me, the white girl, felt like I blended in. After all, I still remembered the beats.
It makes me think of how much I love my little book, though, and how much it deserves to have me work harder in its behalf. I'm working on it. I've got some things I've got to clear up and I'm going to be taking steps in that direction this Thursday. It's a good book. Nobody can take that away from me, but nobody can give me anything more except me.
I played cymbals. I remembered the beats. Go me!
It was so much fun. It took forever to get started, but the weather was great and we waited in a park with all the other groups and and even though it was a very short parade there was a pretty big list of entries, including a bunch of other lions. White Crane brought a couple of lions and a dragon--all B or C teams, but they're so good and everybody was so mellow that it didn't matter. Another school actually put on a quickie little lion dance with benches and everything as a "rehearsal," though I think they were showing off. And they looked good. Not a tremendous amound of acrobatics, but the head and tail were really in sync and sometimes you could believe the lion was really a lion, batting its eyes and grooming its paws. Very nice. I was helping out because my kung fu brother Steve had divided loyalties; he teaches lion dance at both a kwoon and an elementary school, and he needed people to fill in for the kwoon because he was drumming for the elementary school team. The little kids in sparkly pig suits were with his elementary school and his wife Wendy was wearing a pig hat. Only Fudge is cuter, I can tell you.
The parade itself was only about five blocks long but they didn't have a permit to completely stop traffic so we got stuck at major intersections. The kids straggled along, looking less that professional and whacking the ground and each other with the flags they were supposed to spin, even though none of them had learned staff yet and didn't know how. (This school has a lot of very young kids.) We got to the other park and it was like dropping ink into a glass of water--we all diffused into the crowd and swirled about, enjoying the sunshine and the happy crowd, and even me, the white girl, felt like I blended in. After all, I still remembered the beats.
It makes me think of how much I love my little book, though, and how much it deserves to have me work harder in its behalf. I'm working on it. I've got some things I've got to clear up and I'm going to be taking steps in that direction this Thursday. It's a good book. Nobody can take that away from me, but nobody can give me anything more except me.