The Lotus Festival is this weekend and I am going tomorrow--and will hopefully write more on that later! Lotus is a world music festival that is here every fall and everyone gets SUPER jazzed about it. I was sick last year and so slept through it, but I am really looking forward to checking out events tomorrow. (I'm also going to a big cat rescue center in the morning--like, with lions and lynxes and such. Tomorrow should be awesome.)
Anyway, as a precursor to Lotus there have been some events on campus, and today outside the Art Museum was a performance by an Australia group named Strange Fruit. Two friends and I ventured outside to watch, and they were so cool! It is three women and they do a performance art that is a combination of acrobatics, dance, and high-wire walking, all set to various types of classical music. It is hard to describe. They each have a 14 foot long flexible pole, which is affixed to the ground. They each shimmy up their pole, while wearing what look like bloomers, bustiers, and really elaborate hair styles. One had a Tower of Pisa shaped building balanced in her hair, and they all had a lot of gold and glittery eye make-up. Once they get to the top of the pole, they lock their legs into an apparatus so they stay put, and then pull up these hoop-skirts from the ground and put them on, so in the end they resemble bells. And then they spin and flop back and forth, sometimes in unison and sometimes not, and sometimes acting out scenes. Here is a video of what they did today, titled The Three Belles. Here is another video of the same program, but in a different setting.
It was such a surreal looking thing: three belles who look like...bells, floating through the air with seemingly no effort at all. All in front of our museum, with people milling around--older folk, little kids, students, etc. The sky was perfect, blue with puffy white clouds, and floating women. It was, actually, pretty magical.
My day could have used some magical, truth be told. I made a student cry by giving her (really, really gentle) criticism about the first draft of her paper. We *told* them to pick one thesis and stick with and she had six, so I told her she had to commit to one. Which then made her paper a lot shorter, so she started panicking and then started crying. I got on my kindest tone and told her that everything would be okay and that we could look at her object for awhile and come up with some ideas together. [their assignment is to analyze an "unknown" object visually and then hypothesize about its use. The objects are "unknown" because the professor lied about the dimensions and the materials so they really can't look anything up, and then he tells them the real purpose of the objects at the end of the semester. Rather sadistic, but actually a pretty nifty assignment.] Anyway, by the end of the meeting she had calmed down, but she was right at the beginning of my THREE AND A HALF HOURS of constant student paper meetings--seriously, I ran to the bathroom once and that was it. Although, rather nicely, one of my friends texted me in the midst of it and said, "I just walked by your office and saw you earnestly molding a young mind, you're so adorable" so that made me feel better about myself. Also, I missed a departmental luncheon while doing this, but was able to get some delicious leftovers from the secretary, who understands graduate students and our need for free food.
Then I went to the library for a few hours--with a Strange Fruit interlude--went to a really disappointing lecture about film, and then went to another departmental reception, where I got to talk to my friends, drink pinot grigio, and eat canapes. Also, relied crying story to my advisor, whose response was, "aw, your first crier! Congratulations! I really hate it when they do that." Then I came home, because ten hours on campus on a Friday is just a bummer. I video-chatted with my family which improved my day a hundredfold, and now am eating oreos, going to take a bubble bath, and curl up with a Nero Wolfe mystery (just started this series--verdict so far: delightful.) Bed before 10 on a Friday? Sounds good to me.
Will leave you with one last video: the goddess-like Billie Holliday singing the haunting Strange Fruit.
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