Aaaand we're back! My goodness it has been a cyclone of a month. August was so full of PlayHard/WorkHard, that we all took a week at the end just to recover and not do any work. Well, thats a bit false (we worked a bit, of course), but we did a lot less work than usual.
One of the fun things I did at the beginning of the month was tabling at the KaBam festival in Bangor, ME. My fellow Bee, Mandy, and I were there selling posters and talking to a lot of people about our very-serious-and-epic Beehive graphics while a zipline directly above us zoomed squealing adults over our conversations. It was a pretty hilarious day. These are some pictures:
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One of the biggest events of the year for the Beehive and for our town, Machias, is the Blueberry Festival and Blackfly Ball at the end of August. For the last 8 years, the Beehive has been the host of the Blackfly ball. That means that we make a poster for it (pictured below with Mandy), we set up about 12 bands to come and play, we build stages, set up a zillion lights all over the park area, make & set up decorations, do tons of other prep & day-of tasks, and are stationed around during the Festival & Ball selling posters and being safety crew and running the backend of the whole thing, and of course dancing our bottoms off to the great bands in between everything. WorkHard/PlayHard. Over 2,000 people came from all over the States and the World to the Ball this year. It was epic. And awesome.
Oh and something I don't have pictures of is that I decided (like a silly over-achiever) to put on a puppet show about fracking during the festival. So I rallied 10 of my friends, re-wrote an old script I've worked with in the past, borrowed a puppet stage and puppets, had 2 rehearsals, and put on a show. It was pretty great. Pretty low key but a bunch of people came to watch it. We performed it twice during the day of the Festival and I got to be on the local radio talking about it and what fracking is.
Here's Blackfly Ball pics:
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| a view from over the Bad Little Falls to the Ball |
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| another Bee, Emma, and I. She and another Bee, Kaleigh (pictured below), recently also dyed streaks in their hair like mine. It makes me laugh. I like these girls. We have a hair-uniform now. What do you know- streaking is contagious. |
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| the Blackfly Ball is a dress-up funny event too. My roommates in Philly sent up this awesome dress for me to wear without realizing that it was one of our roommate's mom's wedding dress. AH! I was honored to wear it. |
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These are all the people I have been spending my time with. Living together, working together, sharing life, laughs, and tears. We are the Beehive and we kinda kick ass.
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| L-R: Sophie, Zoe, Me, Kehben, Emma, Kyle, Matt, Ethan, Josh, TK, Kaleigh, Iggy |
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| this photoshoot actually happened because Ethan was leaving to continue his life in NYC instead of the Beehive. He is one of the Bees I got closest with, so we'll be continuing our friendship and artistic collaborations in different ways now. Good people. |
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| I put this in here because this happened a few weeks ago and we all dedicated about 3 nights in a row to lying next to different lakes/oceans/rivers and watching meteors. It was a beautiful thing. |
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| Gordo, pictured center, is another Bee who had a birthday. We all dressed up and danced our faces off in the Grange Hall one night. |
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Gabfestry! This was the week-long conference that directly followed the Blackfly Ball. The Beehive also hosted this event. It consisted of about 200 artistic folks camping in our yard, us feeding them, trying to keep them clean, running tech for all events (4 sessions per day, performances at night), providing childcare, facilitating 6 different venues for the week, and all other the logistics that surround such events. The conference was for artistic folks who use their art either politically or in some way to be advocates or activists, or other such things. It was a crazy inspirational week.
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| the flyer we made for the event |
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| those are the banners of our Mesoamerica Resiste poster there on the right. This is the Grange Hall and it is set up here for one of our many night performances that happened that week. |
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| this is a session about artistic metal welding i believe. there was all sorts of things to learn that week! |
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And then... after aaaaaaall that craziness, we circled the week after Gabfestry on the calendar and called it "Chill The Fudge Out Week". We weren't supposed to do any work. Just relax and enjoy ourselves and eachother. So I went hiking with my friend Lindsay, who is the trail master for the Coastal Conservancy here in town. These are some pics from that walk.
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Then I escaped to Bar Harbor with my friends MaryJo, William, and Betsy.
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| yeah we went whale watching |
That's all I'm going to write for now. I have so much else to say, but i'm having a hard time finding time to write it all down. So, more to come later.
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