Hippier Than Thou

The sun rose late over the last morning of the festival (or at least, we rose late).  By the time we rolled out of our tent, all our friends, all the organic coffee vendors and homeless musicians and naked children and drunken surfers were busily packing all their homes back into their cars.  There was a three-week festival coming up in Shiga prefecture, everyone said, and when we tearfully bid farewell to some of our new best friends, we tempered our loneliness by half-promising to see each other at the next festival.  We knew we wouldn’t, though.  In our hearts, we're bike hippies, not music festival hippies.

The Austrian, despite his earlier decision to stay another week to help clean up, hustled out of there with the first drunken surfer who’d give him a ride to Shiga.  The other WWOOFer had gone, too, and with such a show of affection from the Pasar crowd that I have never seen before.  Shaking, she read a statement that someone had written in phonetic Japanese, then switched to more heartfelt (if no less shaky) English.  She received a fond round of applause and many, many hugs as she went on her way.

For some reason Jenn and I were the only ones to honor the "make a weird face" edict.  Funny how that keeps happening.

By one o’clock, almost everyone was gone.  Ours was the last lonely tent still standing in the campground, the field around us stamped with squares and rectangles all different shades of yellow and brown.  It was time to get back into the Pasar groove: help out a little, play some music, maybe cook something, and just generally take in the sea air.

Though it is hard to really relax when your butt scrapes on the ground.

"Tomorrow, we'll need to you help out again," Natsu told us after Aki had retreated to wherever it is he goes.  "We have a very important seminar, and we need to get the place all cleaned up before the teachers get here."

"Of course!" we agreed, happy to have some work to do (though maybe not that happy).   "What's the seminar about?"

"Whaling."

We threw ourselves into taking down the bamboo bar, clearing bottles, sweeping dirt and dumping it into larger piles of dirt.  We were told that it was important that we stay quiet during the seminar, as the proceedings were top secret unless we paid the fifty bucks each to join in.  Also, there would be food, which we would be allowed to eat if there was any extra.

When the teachers arrived, we helped them carry large styrofoam boxes into the Dragon Room.  "What's in these, anyway?" I asked Natsu.

"Whale!  Now go light the oven, please."

I think we're gonna need a bigger oven.

It was then that it dawned on us that this was a pro-whaling seminar happening at Pasar.  Naturally, as children of the '90s in the US, Jenn and I have been thoroughly educated in the "Save the Whales" dialogue.  Specifically, we've been taught that whaling is bad and that whalers are evil, heartless monsters whose boats are fueled by the tears of crippled puppies.  Being a hippie establishment, we assumed that Pasar would naturally be on the side of some of the more prominent American hippie establishments like Greenpeace (and Captain Kirk).

Once again, we were provided with an opportunity to confront some unexamined biases we've held.  It's not that hard for an American to get behind "Save the Whales," if only because giving up eating whale isn't much of a challenge for the average American.  It's not hard to give something up if you'd never encounter it in the first place.  Though, as we discovered at a museum in Hagi, this hasn't always been the case for Americans: indeed, the US's hunger for whale oil was so insatiable a mere century and a half ago that America was fully willing to invade Japan in order to get to the whales in its waters.  But even back then, when American sailors were bringing in whales by the thousands, they still weren't really a hot commodity on the dinner table.

Japan, meanwhile, has chowed down on whale throughout its history.  Now I'm not one to accept "tradition" as a reason for basically anything, and "tradition" is used as a justification for a bunch of nasty stuff worldwide (especially in Japan), but I tried to keep an open mind as Natsu educated us. Did you know that there's actually a population boom of whales in recent years?  Or that whales are a much more sustainable food source than most livestock?  Neither did I, and I'm not terribly sure I believe either of those things now, either, but Natsu sure stated her case admirably.

Sure, whales may be intelligent and make noises that sound beautiful to human ears, but heck, pigs are at least as cute and intelligent as dogs and that hasn't really sparked a popular "Save the Pigs" campaign.  Though we were not sure about the prospect of eating such an intelligent animal, one that we'd been long taught to regard as gentle and soulful, when the pizzas topped with whale bacon came out of the brick oven, our adventurousness won out and we had a slice or three.  They were tasty as heck, though really, I'd probably eat my own head if it was served on a brick-oven pizza.

The whaling seminar wasn't the only such affair held at Pasar during our short stay there.  During the festival, there was also a lecture given on the dangers of vaccination.

"It's unhealthy to put chemicals into your body," said Natsu between puffs on her American Spirit.  Aki and Shio nodded along and lit their own cigarettes.

This is an interesting point that we keep running into: the farther to the left you go, the more you find people who share opinions with folks on the far, far right.  Pasar is as big a hippie enclave as we've ever found ourselves, a hotbed of permaculture, veganism, pacifism, organic farming...and they're also anti-vax, pro-whaling.  While I understand (and share!) a healthy skepticism when it comes to the medical industry, the controversy about vaccinations seems to be coming from a place of gratuitous anti-intellectualism.  I hadn't expected people as smart as Aki and Natsu to fall for the Naturalistic Fallacy, but there it is.  We did the hippie thing and kept our peace, sealing our lips as they told us about the evils of vaccination.

Another brief illustration of the Naturalistic Fallacy at work: one afternoon, Shio went walking down by the ocean with a fishing spear, and in the evening he came back with a delicious-looking octopus.  Natsu butchered it beautifully and we ate it sashimi-style, raw with soy sauce.  Now, I'm all for foraging and fishing (as long as other people do it), but there was an implicit assumption at play here that an octopus swimming around the ocean, by virtue of it being "natural," would be healthful for human beings to eat.  Moreover, that it would be better for the people who ate it than farmed octopi that would probably be full of chemicals of an indeterminate nature.

Don't get me wrong.  The octopus was damned delicious, and I'd eat another one right this minute.  But I also don't know where this particular octopus had been or what it had been eating.  It could have been chock full of octopus flu, for all Shio had known.  I mean, it's an established fact that the ocean is 90% fish poo.  But the prevailing attitude at Pasar is that, because this octopus is natural, it is also better than anything touched by human hands.

Another illustration of the Naturalistic Fallacy: because this giant, face-sized, poison-slavering spider is natural, it must be a good thing!  You know, despite all the very obvious evidence to the contrary!

Really, we shouldn't have been surprised; this wasn't our first run-in with Pasar's anti-science stance.  When I came down with a cold after a few days of sleeping in a damp, rained-on tent, I decided to pop a couple of milligrams of Japanese cold medicine.  Over-the-counter medicine in Japan is exceedingly wimpy, but as it's what's available, we have a whole pharmacy stashed in one of our bags.  My one error was to take these pills while sitting in the living room.

"Hey, what is that?" Aki asked me in English as the pill was inches from my open mouth.

"Uh...cold medicine?  I have a cold."

"Don't take that, that's no good."  He shook his head.  I was about to agree, saying that it might not be very potent, but it's all you can buy in this country, but before I could, he told me, "Go ask Natsu for homeopathy."  I tried to keep my eyebrows unraised.

Within minutes, Natsu had retrieved a clear plastic medicine chest filled with pill bottles.  She looked through the dazzling array of colored circles.  "Headache?" she asked, and I nodded.  "Phlegm?"  At last, she presented me with a small pink pill, which she instructed me to hold under my tongue until it dissolved.

"What's...uh, what's in this?"

"Sugar," she said, chipper.  Sure enough, it left a sweet taste in my mouth as it quickly melted into nothing.  I had my doubts; after all, I already take plenty of sugar, mostly administered orally, with chocolate chips.  Yet oddly enough, I did start to feel better before long, and that replaced my cold with crippling existential doubt.  The placebo effect works only if you believe in whatever you're taking, right?  And I have no faith at all in the power of sugar pills, and that very doubt should kill their efficacy, right?

As I've said, I consider myself a bit of a hippie.  I quit my job to bike around the world, I care about the environment, I've belonged to the ACLU and Amnesty International, I believe in art and love and peace, I've experimented with vegetarianism (and absolutely nothing else, Mom).  I don't have a TV.  But holy cow, I am not nearly as big a hippie as I thought I was.  Vaccinated?  Anti-whaling?  Over-the-counter drugs?  If full-time permaculture meditating organic farm hippies look down on those things, then what kinda tourist does that make me?

On our last day before hitting the road, another young, awkward WWOOFer asked Natsu what exactly "hippie" meant.  "Long hair, hemp pants, tie-die, right?"  I rolled my eyes.

"Yes, that's 'hippie style.'  It's all tied up in the '60s, there really aren't any hippies any more," she said, and my eyes stopped rolling and started bugging out.  Surely not!  How could anyone doubt that hippies are alive and well after hosting a week-long music festival on her organic farm?

"Natsu, I always thought that you and Aki were hippies," I protested.

She shook her head.  "We're alternative.  All the hippies are gone."

I kept quiet and reflected on this for the rest of the evening.  I've known many people who've self-identified as hippies, but mostly it's a term that I hear coming out of my own mouth.  Hippiedom in the US is a fairly competitive thing: vegans look down on vegetarians, bike hippies look down on hippies with cars.  I'm sure I brought this competitive spirit with me to Pasar, and whether it's a difference of culture or language, the same definition of "hippie" just doesn't seem to exist in Japan.  I don't feel like I particularly want or need to fit into a subculture that may or may not exist any more, but for some time now I've called myself a hippie with some pride.  Maybe that's just another gift from my Boomer parents.  Even if I'm not a hippie by Japanese standards, even if I'm not enough of a hippie by hippie standards, it's still a label that simplifies my multifarious life into an easy-to-understand cultural archetype.

Regardless of the nomenclature, I know that I've seen some common spirit shared by the hippies/alternatives/whatever whom I've known.  If dancing under the full moon at Pasar isn't hippie, then I still want to be whatever it is.  Whatever our ideological or lifestyle differences with Aki and Natsu and all the others in the Pasar family, we share so, so much.  That will always connect us, and that will bring us back again.

You Ate WHAT? Mystery Edition

I still have no goddamn idea what this stuff was.

People Persons

The next morning, we were relieved to be finished with our hardest task at Pasar, though that relief was tempered slightly by our disappointment at the disappearing audience.

“A lot of our friends spent 10, 12 hours driving here yesterday from Wakayama or further,” Natsu explained.  “They all fell asleep early.”

“But you can perform again on Friday if you want to,” said Aki in a rare show of energy.  We agreed, excited, and, figuring we’d practiced enough by that point, threw ourselves into enjoying the festival.  Over the next week, we overcame our shyness enough to become quite close to some of the Pasar family and friends:

There was Mayumi, proprietress of "Mayumi's Miracle Cafe," with an unbelievable laugh and a cigarettey voice.  The rumors said she had worked in the fashion industry for 30 years before quitting to run a vegan cafe.  When we parted ways, we wondered if we would meet again, and she told us, "Maybe we will.  Every minute, every second...is a miracle!" and roared with laughter.

Shuuichi.  Tatted up, giant holes in his ears that he would sometimes use to transport cigarettes, carrying around a hollowed-out gourd full of alcohol, he would frequently just bend over or list to one side for a few minutes.  I thought he might be narcoleptic, but then I saw him driving a car.  He did talk to me at length about his life -- I caught very little of it, but it seems he was a hikkikomori, a shut-in, for twelve years.  Now he spends his time trying to experience as much as he can of life.  Rumor has it he did some of his tattoos himself while locked away in his house.

This dude came by himself and danced like nobody has danced before, usually while wearing outrageous masks or swinging around kites that he made out of cut-up magazines.  Oh, and he's just as blurry in real life.

Yoko and little Haru-kun, sporting the official festival garb.

Our worries about filling our idle time fizzled quickly: from our first cup of coffee at 8 a.m., we were put to work kneading pizza dough, lighting the fire for the brick oven, baking and selling pizzas, helping Maya in the communal kitchen, carrying heavy objects to the stage and back.  When we had a moment to breathe, we were asked to give the other WWOOFers a break and work the bar.

“Hey, you can’t come back here,” the Austrian told us when we first fetched someone a beer.

“What?” I asked, certain that I had just misheard over the band.  But no, he explained, the bar area was only for staff, and Jenn and I weren’t allowed back there.  In an uncharacteristic disregard for confrontation, I explained to him in small words that we were part of the staff, that we were here to help at Pasar, and Natsu herself told us to take over the bar.  He spent the next few hours offering elaborate apologies and bowing in what sure looked like a patronizing manner.

In truth, I liked being a bartender.  It was one of the few tasks that needed doing that didn’t require a higher level of Japanese or knowledge of the inner workings of Pasar Moon.  I got to be right at the heart of the party -- hell, after a couple of Pasar mojitos, I fancied myself the most indispensable part of the party -- and I had an excuse to interact with all of the merrymakers.  Plus, at the bar, we had the best seat in the house:

“That’s now how you make a mojito,” the Austrian told me, his lip curled in a sneer, his eyes rolling like pinballs.  I pretended not to hear him, but at last I thanked him for the help and got him to teach me how to properly pour one.

Then it was, “You have to tip the glass when you pour the beer.”  And, still later, “You opened the valve on the keg too much, let me fix it for you.”  When he disappeared after pouring three cups of pure foam, I adjusted it back.

Of course, if we were part of the Pasar staff, we may not have acted like it the whole time.  After Aki told us that, despite his earlier offer, Dragon Room presenters wouldn’t be receiving envelopes full of dead presidents to perform, we were informed that we would still be getting free admission to the festival and free food.  Unfortunately, meals at Pasar, especially during festival time, are a very sporadic thing.  Often we would be so busy at the pizza oven that we wouldn't think to eat anything until two or three in the afternoon.  With no staff meal obviously forthcoming, we would buy some food from one of the many food stalls, only to be told half an hour later that the staff's free lunch was ready.

Still, there are fates worse than a piping-hot Pasar Burger.

At least the music was great.  The live performances spanned from trippy looped acoustic guitars to reggae to punk to things we’d never heard before.  One of Pasar’s regulars, supposedly the 40th generation priest at the local Shinto shrine, took the stage to play something extremely trippy that he called “space rock.”  The DJs killed it, too, playing a great deal of Afrobeat and funk and generally keeping the crowd in a dancing mood: one proud dad bounced his little daughter on his shoulders to the sounds of “Rapper’s Delight,” big old grins on both their faces.  We bopped our heads and danced in place by the pizza oven or at the bar while the Austrian sulked or bored the other WWOOFer to tears.

Taka watched a kid use a piece of bamboo as a guitar to play along with the band.  He drilled a couple of holes in it and attached a shoulder strap.  The kid proceeded to completely shred on his new instrument.

On Friday night, before performing at the acoustic showcase that would close out the evening, we were treated to a burst of traditional Japanese culture.  First, a duo dressed in kimonos took the outdoor stage and led the crowd in bon-odori, the standard Japanese festival dance.  There’s really no analogue for it in America; it’s a seasonal activity that everyone in the country is very familiar with, so maybe the best comparison would be like singing Christmas carols.  But, y'know, dancing.  The crowd went nuts, every man, woman, child and dog gleefully performing the dance moves that are so remedial they’re almost offensive.

Then, the central courtyard of Pasar was transformed into a stage for the kagura, a traditional Japanese performance art.  It was described to me as a “snake dance” or “warrior dance,” but what it turned out to be was an elaborately staged pantomime.  The first act had a masked figure engage in a fishing exhibition that had him flinging hard candy to the crowd and snookering volunteers to come and help him catch papier-mache fish.  He brought our young American friend up, and she performed her duties admirably (though she did break his fishing pole), apparently oblivious to the fact that the young, blonde American invited to participate in an ancient ritual under the full moon is pretty much doomed.

The second act brought the promised snakes, which were actually dragons for some reason.  The protagonist, whose words were muffled through his mask and who gasped for air in between lines, was evidently some sort of mustachioed dragon-slayer, much like Super Mario.  The three dragons were rendered with terrifying detail, and I gasped with the rest of the audience when they had the protagonist tangled in their deadly coils.  The story ended on a happy note, though, with the dragons’ heads chopped off and tossed into the crowd.

Luckily, we didn’t have to follow the dramatized execution: before we took the stage again in the Dragon Room, there was a long performance by a very diverse group of musicians, including hula dancers and a bongo player who was the spitting image of Snoop Dogg (but, y’know, Japanese).  The house was still fairly full when Jenny Dreadful (that’s us) started to perform, and with only fifteen or so minutes to play, we did some of our old favorites: “You Made the Night Too Long,” “Bei Mir Bist du Schoen,” “Feelin’ Good,” and “I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl.”  The audience loved it, and we felt immediately vindicated.  We came to Japan to do exactly this, and how ‘bout that, we killed it!  The final performance by a tall, mohawked didgeridoo player brought a satisfying end to the evening.  Jenny Dreadful received about 1000 yen in tips, 500 of which we gave to the didgeridooist.

Saturday came, the penultimate day of the festival.  Everything had settled into a nice, comfortable groove: coffee, kitchen duties, making pizza, breakfast at 2 p.m.  In the evening, when Jenn went to lie down on the tent for awhile, I went to the bar to offer the WWOOFers a break.

“Hey, Harry!” the Austrian greeted me.  “Tequila?”  He produced the bottle and poured a couple of shots, plus one for Mayumi.

“Hey, thanks,” I said cautiously.  “You buying?”

“Nah, I don’t have any money,” he replied.

Mayumi and I exchanged a look.  “I can keep a secret,” she said, then burst into laughter.

The Austrian produced the salt and announced in a bizarre fake accent even more affected than his own, “Hai, Pablo Escobar especial...co-caine!”  He looked at us expectantly.  Mayumi and I laughed, though I think hers may have been genuine.  We downed our shots, regretting that the limes had sold out the night before, and all high-fived.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” said the other WWOOFer in a low voice.  Before I could get a chance to ask her any questions, I heard a booming “Tequila!” followed by a raucous cheer.  Behind me, the Austrian was pouring another round of gratis tequila shots.

“Yeah, he’s been doing that for awhile now,” she told me, rubbing her eyes.  I eyed the Austrian, who cheersed with a half dozen roaring drunk musicians (including last night's didgeridooist) and offered them "Pablo Escobar especial...co-caine" to a barrage of laughter.

"Don't worry," I told her with the false bravado of speaking to a 17-year-old, "I've got this."

Dutifully, I took the bar next to the Austrian and slapped him on the back.  "Hey," I began.  "Hey," this time in a friendly manner, as one would address his best buddy who also happens to be haplessly drunk.  "I've got it, man, you can take a break."

"No, no, it's good, I...I work."  His English was worse than I remembered, and if he was this out of it, I doubted my ability to peacefully convince him to leave.  We worked side by side, though hardly together, through the final band of the evening.  I poured a few more rounds of tequila for some of the musicians -- apparently he had given them a taste for the stuff.  Eventually he wandered off once he realized he wouldn't be getting any more free drinks, and I kept to my work cheerfully.

Around eleven o'clock, when the last band had wrapped up, the didgeridooist assembled his friends to do another shot of tequila.  I poured four, then five, then eventually seven as more friends wandered up.  I hadn't congratulated the tall man for his excellent performance on the didgeridoo the night before, but I held my tongue when I saw how much he was listing from side to side.  He met my eyes and gave me some sour look I couldn't read, so I went back to my work.  When I passed out the shots and the salt, the musicians raised their cups, cheersed, and downed their tequila with gusto.  Except for the didgeridooist, who pointed at my chest, slurred something beyond my Japanese ability, then reached his long arm across the bar and poured his tequila all down the front of my shirt.  Pinned by the bar as I was, I had no room to do anything but take it, the cold liquor wetting my clothes.

I lacked the vocabulary to take any action.  "Why did you do that," for instance, or "what the hell did you do that for?"  What I did manage was a polite, "Oh, no, you spilled your drink!"  The didgeridooist reeled back a bit, not averting his dark eyes from mine.  His friends started to disappear, though one or two of them said something quiet to him.

"You say somethin'?" he barked at me, or at least that's how I understood it.  I denied saying anything, collected the empty shot glasses, and turned my back to him, trying to keep tears from welling up.  He wandered off at some point, and I held it together long enough to close the bar promptly at midnight and collapse in the tent.  I heard later that Taka reopened the bar not long after and the party, including the Austrian and the didgeridooist, kept the fun going until five in the morning.

I wish I understood what was going through the didgeridooist's head (or, y'know, coming out of his mouth).  I've never had the experience of esteem and admiration for someone turning to a feeling of betrayal.  At least, not so quickly.  Or wetly.  Maybe I somehow gave offense without realizing it.  Maybe he was just a mean drunk.  Probably that one.  He evaded my eyes for the rest of the festival, either because he felt shame about what he did or, not remembering, he disliked me enough to avoid me.

Whatever the reason, I tried not to think anything bad about Pasar, even as I saw Pasar's friends and staff hang out with this guy into the wee hours.  This may have been an ugly incident, but peace and love were still the words at Pasar, and 99% of the people at the festival immediately became my favorite people in the world.

Return to Pasar Moon

Last year, when we first made the acquaintance of the good folks at Pasar Moon, we were immediately welcomed into this small, close-knit family.  Though Pasar is ostensibly a cafe and campground, we arrived at the beginning of the season, when customers were in short supply. The daily routine involved the two of us, Pasar's proprietors (Aki and Natsu), and one other WWOOFer.  Basically, we were special; we were kept up to speed in the goings-on of opening Pasar for the year, there was plenty of obvious work to be done, and we were the featured entertainers at an impromptu party they threw.

This time, we had no way of knowing what to expect, so in our pessimism, we feared we would be lost in the shuffle.  I don't know from music festivals.  I've been to a couple in my day, sure, all of them different.  For whatever reason, I most expected that the annual Pasar Music Festival would be most like the "Purple Nozzle" festival we attended in Korea: loud, dirty, crowded, expensive, running until the wee hours of the morning, and generally just an event by and for people who make me feel about a dillion years old.  To be honest, I was a bit worried.  We'd planned a lot around attending this festival -- Aki's invitation to perform at the festival was the main reason we came back to Japan in the first place -- and as were about to arrive, we realized we could be heading for an event that we might bitterly hate.

When another unfamiliar staff member dropped us off at the front gate, all our worries were erased.  There was Natsu, warm and competent as always, and Aki, too, happy to see us in his own grumpy way.  Many new friends awaited us, too, and we learned all their names (and promptly forgot them) over one of Natsu's amazing meals.


"Aki-san, we want to help!" I blurted out at one point.

"OK, ask Natsu," he told us as he clicked away on his computer.

"Natsu-san, we want to help!"  She smiled and said there would be plenty of work for us to do if we wanted to help out.  Even though part of our visit as guest musicians involved free room and board, the thought of just standing by without pitching in filled me with shame.  Besides, we didn't just want to be visitors, we wanted to be part of the Pasar family again.

"First, though, we have to rehearse," Jenn said.  Also very true: somehow "rehearse for our show" kept getting put off, preempted by to the previous week's goal of "escape the typhoon."  Natsu agreed enthusiastically and showed us to the Dragon Room.

So named because it is a room.

Before long, we made the acquaintance of two of Pasar's current WWOOFers: a 17-year-old American gal who, after five weeks at Pasar, had become the beloved mascot of the place, and a 24-year-old Austrian mechanical engineer who very quickly became a giant pain in our butts.  The first words out of his mouth were a humblebrag (never a good sign): apparently at his last WWOOF host in Malaysia, he was made the manager of the cafe within a month of working there.  He left, he said, because it was too much work, sometimes 16 hours a day by the end of his stay there, and he was paid in beer and cigarettes.

Still, we made the most of our situation, trying to stay true to our pledge of support to Natsu: the Austrian and I wove together a roof of young bamboo for a hangout spot, we helped Natsu in the kitchen, we set up tent after tent and we practiced until our little fingers turned bloody.  All in wonderfully typhoon-free weather, naturally.  For the first 24 hours, while it was still uncertain if we were volunteers or part of the family, we had found our groove, and life was sweet.

Things changed when the festival opened on Monday.  The formerly spacious campsite and buildings made of reclaimed materials grew full and noisy, not with the young rave crowd of Purple Nozzle, nor the young, dreadlocked hippie crowd we'd been expecting.  For the most part, the two hundred or so attendees were either families or single older dudes who had grown exceedingly weird in their age and single-ness.



It's funny, but when all these people both exciting and ordinary filed through the entrance, I felt more than anything like that awkward, friendless 13-year-old at the middle school dance again.  Should I just invite myself into the happy reunions that our Pasar friends were sharing with these colorful characters?  Just sit at the Bamboo Bar and strike up a conversation with the guy with the enormous dreads?  What business did I have joining conversations when I frequently couldn't understand what these people were saying?  What if they didn't like me and stuffed me in a locker?  I solved this dilemma by hurriedly finding work that needed doing, although that presented a problem in itself: to find Natsu-san, who's busy every second of the day, and ask her to find a chore that can be done by someone with no appreciable skills, then explain it to me in simple Japanese...well, as often as not, I wondered if I might not be more helpful by just staying out of the way.

The festival began with a ceremonial appeal to the Earth, the theme of this year's festival being "Earth Week."  Or, rather, it was supposed to, but things got going kind of late, and if there was such a ceremony, I must have blinked and missed it.  Jenn and I missed the first few performances on the outdoor stage, opting to find somewhere quiet for some last-minute rehearsal.  At 9:00, we entered the Dragon Room, raring to go, only to find that there would be a meditation seminar opening for us.  I suggested to Jenn that we sit in on the meditation, eager to get some enlightenment and stuff; she told me that it would just make us fall asleep, but I insisted, hoping to build some good karma by attending another performer's (?) event.

There was much chanting, singing, playing of lyres, and extremely groovy explanations that went clear over my head.  10:00 came and went.  "What time is it, do we still have some time?" the meditation instructor asked at about 10:15.  "Uh..." Aki said, looking for his watch, before she interrupted.  "Well, we'll just do this one more activity, then."

When at last the meditation event and post-event chat had wrapped up, Aki had left the room, so we stormed the stage unintroduced.  Well, "stormed" might not be quite accurate.

"Should we start?" I asked, surveying the room.  There were maybe six very sleepy-looking people in the audience, most of them left over from the meditation and presumably too relaxed to get up.

"I don't know...I guess so?"  At the back of the room, someone cheered, so we struck up the band.

It wasn't a great show, maybe, but without a doubt, it was a good show.  The audience was very appreciative, especially one drunk Michigander who wandered in at one point, but it remained in the single digits for the whole show.

"Okay, so, we're going to take a break," Jenn announced, "but, uh...we'll be back for a second set."

"Maybe?" I added, ever the showman.

By 11:30, we were back in our tent.  At least, we thought, we wouldn't have to worry about the music and dancing going until 5 a.m.; this festival was clearly meant for geezers like us.  The only sounds that drifted into the tent were the crickets and the waves crashing on the nearby shore.