Ah, yeah, you know those pictures at the top of the blog here, where we’re all dressed kind of crazy like flower children? Yeah, those are from a TOTALLY AWESOME thing where we dressed as wild as possible and then traipsed around town Friday, June 7th. (Yeah, I know, it was almost two weeks ago–we’re trying to catch up on blogs!)
So Nelda is starting this arts camp called Wild Noise at Happy Valley in late July/August (actually July 29-Aug 1). Her goal is to raise awareness about Happy Valley in the community as a place to have camps/retreats/gatherings in the beautiful redwoods. (Have we mentioned it’s beautiful here?) Another goal of the camp is to provide a camp for artists in a beautiful location, and bring them together to allow them to create fantasticness.
The camp focuses on installation art (land art, specifically–if you don’t know about it, you should totally be wikipediaing it here), music, and film, although if someone is interested in something else, the camp is inclusive of all art forms. Anyway, here’s the website, in case you’re interested. It’s pretty cool. Also they have a Facebook page.
And Nelda thought it would be cool to dress everyone up all crazy, to reflect the camp name and spirit, and then hand out fliers, seen below in the picture.
So that’s what we did. Here is our recipe for accosting the shoppers of Santa Cruz:
- Eat quesadillas prepared by Nelda.
Nelda, fixing quesadillas, with Brooke, photobombing. - Dress in all black. It’s mysterious.
- Find sticks and flowers.
- Hot glue sticks and flowers to headbands.
- Paint face and body as interestingly as possible.
- Go to downtown Santa Cruz and hand out yellow fliers.
Recipe successfully executed. All fliers were given away. And we had a grand old time. We even danced a little bit in Trader Joe’s. If you want to watch it, you can find it here: wild noise dance
And then afterwards, we went out for SUSHI!!!!
At “I Love Sushi” (the name of the restaurant), they were so full, we had to go to the karaoke room. (gah!)
Luckly though, the biggest performance was not karaoke –the sorority group gave goodbye speeches to their seniors but no one else used the microphone. No, instead of listening to karaoke, we watched a lot of people drink sake bombs, which was really fun to watch.
And then one time, this older man who worked at the restaurant was challenged to a race with two of the twenty-somethings: they had to hit the table to drop the sake into the beer, and then whoever finished drinking it, won. And the man (who was probably somewhere between 40 years old and 60), drank his so fast, it looked like he barely raised the glass to his lips before it was gond! So that was fun!
All in all, it was a great day. We dressed crazy, hung out with Nelda, (and Jeff who took those pictures in the blog banner) and ran around Santa Cruz feeling quite successful in our integration into the street-art community!
-Antonia
