Asakiyume mita

Today Matt, of Where the Hell [now toned down to Heck] Is Matt fame (videos here and here), came to dance in South Amherst.

I was one of the first people to arrive, but gradually more and more people came, until we had a small crowd. There was a woman whose name was Forest--not Forest Something, or Something Forest, just Forest. She's a dancer. There was a young meteorologist, and an acquaintance of mine who does shape-note singing, and a pastor who is going to let me go up into her belfry to take pictures of her bell and who has a little daughter. There was a woman with her two grandchildren. So many people, happy to dance!

He came with just a smartphone to film with! And asked for a stepladder and a chair, and people found those things--and then for someone willing to film, and guess who was willing: wakanomori!

Here he is consulting with Matt (forgive the crummy photo; I didn't bring my camera (crazy), so this is taken with my cell phone)



Here are two pictures of the crowd that wakanomori took from his vantage point on the ladder (you can click through to see bigger) (Also, the pastor's church is over on the right as you look at the picture):





Here's the front row, where the kids were (my cell phone picture again):



After it was over, one guy called out, "You've been all over the world--what's one thing you've learned?" Matt thought about it a minute and said, "That people want to be helpful."

It's true--you could see it in action right there. A sunshiny thought.

Matt collects way more video footage than he uses in his final video, and what he got today may not make it in--but it'll be up on his website, eventually. When it is, I'll link.

Last of all, a posed shot together :-)



[Edit, from 2018. I'm going through carefully putting photos that were only available on Livejournal into my Dreamwidth photo storage, so that when I cease to pay for an LJ account, the photos will continue to be visible. As I do, I'm revisiting the past from the future. In this case, I know now, which I didn't then, that this Matt video would be lackluster compared to the early ones; that you can't go to places based on popular demand and have as interesting and diverse a video, and that the enthusiasm of the earlier years can't be maintained for ever and ever. Matt deserves to--and ought to--move on to a new project. Hopefully now he is/has.]

Just imagine everything is golden-yellow. Birds everywhere are golden: yellow warblers with streaks of orange on their breasts, and goldfinches, and golden-orange orioles, and black-and-white bobolinks with golden heads. Even the red-winged blackbird, with his scarlet epaulets, has yellow gold on him: fringe for those epaulets. And all these birds are singing golden songs. The trees, meanwhile, are a hundred different hues of yellow and green, and in the tender new grass (which tastes like the scent of hay), there are dandelions, with stems a foot long and flowers the size of half-dollar coins.

Around the corner of one road,a car had pulled way up off the road and two women and a little boy were knee deep in the meadow, picking dandelions. One woman wore a loose, off-the-shoulder top; the other had purple-red hair. The boy seemed barely dandelion-height.

I was with teenybuffalo; it was about 5 pm. We smiled as we passed, and the purple-haired woman said, in an almost intoxicated voice, "You want one?" and we said sure, and Teeny put hers through the buttonholes of her vest, a boutonnière, and I stuck mine in my braid--souvenirs of the golden land.

no camera, so here is a vague sketch from memory