House of Cards and Entourage

“Windmills not Weapons”, unless you are Don Quixote, for whom windmills were armed. Today, the Saint Louis Earth Day Festival was held for the 26th time. It purports to be the second largest Earth Day festival in the country. Anne was still under the weather, so I soloed to the park by bicycle. Hence, the picture of the four young ladies. I think that their costumes were an art project. Quite a few other people were in costume too. With 250+ booths, the venue selection was quite eclectic. Whenever I go to the Earth Day Festival, I always feel that I’ve returned to my happy old hippy Ann Arbor days of yore. There are always plenty on freaks and geeks, artists, naturalists, environmentalist, charities of all stripes, politicos and aluminum siding salesmen at the festival and they are all nicely grouped by category. It makes it so much easier to do your ideological comparison shopping or to find that nice new set of green gutters. Venues that I feel comprise appropriate Earth Day activities include nature and wildlife, wellness, the peace garden, a public forum, energy conservation, eco art, reduce, reuse and recycle. The one person that I saw that I knew was Pat from work. She always volunteers for the Earth Day Festival.

Because Anne was not feeling well last night, I did the dance concert in her stead. Joanie and I dined in Ferguson at a nice little Mexican restaurant called El Palenque, which means the cockpit, as in a cockfighting pit. It is located just south of the Ferguson police station and as such has seen plenty of fighting this last year. Maria, the owner, waited on us. At first business was slow, especially for a Saturday night, but by the time that we were leaving things had picked up. They sell sweets to go and after we had both put down our cash for the meal, we shopped for chocolates. Checking out at the register, there was some confusion and I saw a moment of panic on Maria’s face, when we explained that we had left our cash on the table. She rushed to retrieve the money and then rang us out. The food was good, as was the service and all for a very reasonable price. What more could you ask for?

We got to the Touhill early enough to hear the preshow lecture. One of the directors was interviewed and then entertained questions. I learned that Compagnie Käfig, last night’s performing French hip-hop theater company, is populated by Brazilian dancers and not Algerian as I had earlier reported. The choreographer, Mourad Merzouki, is of Algerian descent and the company might have been all Algerian at one point, but not any longer. The show was performed in two short acts. Each act comprised just one dance. The inspiration for each dance came from the director’s personal observations of the company’s eleven men dancers, all from Rio. The first dance was called Correria, which means foray or raid and is all about the frantic, hectic race of the dancer’s everyday lives. The second dance was called Agwa or water. The director had observed his dancers always drinking lots of water to stay hydrated. The sole prop for this dance were water filled Solo plastic cups, hundreds of them. After the concert, we attended a rave in the Touhill’s atrium. Members of company did b-boying (breakdancing) along with some rather adept audience members.