this was my second year at burning
man and as the conventional wisdom goes: the first year you wander
about in awe of the whole thing, the second year you are tremendously
motivated and undertake some outrageous project and the third year you
realize that the second year was a huge pain in the ass and opt for an
easier project with more people to share the burden. no one says what
happens in the fourth year or later, but i'll let you know when i find
out.
this being my second year, i was bound and determined to do something
cool. i managed to convince ray (a first timer) that it was worth our
while to expend the effort, so we came up with a crazy idea (ray gets most
of the credit for that), enlisted some help and had the good fortune of
shacking up with Camp Aaargh! on the playa which provided prime
real estate on which to assemble our creation.
the crazy idea was the Star Onning Machine (apparently called the
Star On Machine in the Dr. Seuss book about the Sneetches, so we
labeled the machine accordingly but I still like the addition of the
-ing). the basic idea, if you haven't read the book, was to create a
machine into which plain-bellied sneetches entered through one door, had
stars painted on their bellies and exited as star-bellied sneetches
through the other. we had great plans to extend this idea to all sorts of
body decorating, but it turned out that the star-onning itself was the
main attraction.
in the end, the project was declared a smashing success. the jury is out on whether or not we'll decide next year that the machine was too big a pain in the ass to bear repeating, but early returns are that we're going to try something even bigger and better next year. har!
without further ado, this is the story of our adventure...