Turtles, Small Pressers, Sparks and Shot-puts
Monday, June 20, 2005
Did you have a good weekend? You don’t even want to know what I did:
Fellow Conspirator Matt Dembicki has began to post a counter to my Here’s the Thing… article over at the blog. It’s called The Small Presser and the first issue is all about Xerox vs. small print shops. I suggest you check it out.
Also, I’ve been getting some wonderful submissions for the Washington Spark and began designing the page yesterday. I think I should have no problem filling my first page with some great comics. I also plan on doing a spotlight on an Indy creator or two every week, depending on how much space I have. The plan for now is to actually have an entire editor’s corner where I say a quick blurb and then spotlight some cats. It’s kind of funny – we feel that Elk’s Run and Western Tales of Terror do good numbers but we hope to get them over 3k an issue. The Washington Spark distributes 20k papers and it’s considered small-time. Makes you wonder about comics, doesn’t it?
_________________________
In either the fifth or sixth grade we had instructors from the local dance school come to PS 58s and teach us interpretive dancing. We had a couple of lessons, a workshop of sorts where we acted out some scene in dance. It was kind of odd for an inner city Brooklyn elementary school but PS58 was always a bit progressive.
After the workshop we were tasked to break up into groups of five and come up with our own interpretive dance number. Each group will compete against each other and the winner wins free ballet lessons.
My friends and I didn’t take it too seriously, we were the guys that were cutting violin after all, free ballet lessons was more of a punishment for guys like us. Never-the-less we needed to do something so G, Ross, George, James and I teamed up to create our own interpretive dance.
We needed a theme and since the 1988 Summer Olympics was approaching we figured that would be as good a theme as any. We had our theme and we had our dancers and we had our desire to lose – all that was left to set out and create the worst interpretive dance of all time.
We acted out several Olympic events in a whimsical, fleet-footed manner. First was the torch, where the five of us took turns prancing across the stage and handing an imaginary torch to each other. The last guy to get it went up to James, who was pretending to be the cauldron thing you light at the Olympics, and put the “torch” to James head. James jumped up, arms moving through the air, pretending to be the Olympic flame.
And it only got worse.
Our hurdle dance that was basically leap-frog with dramatic hand-movements. Our gymnastics dance which was basically the lot of us attempting to do cartwheels (to this day I have yet to perform a successful cartwheel – I just don’t think it’s possible). Our marathon dance consisted of us pretending to be really tired while running, taking fake cups of water from peoples hands and shooting them down.
My personal favorite was the shot-put. Instead of pretending to have a shot-put, we made Ross our shot-put. As a reminder, everything bad happened to Ross. Everything. So for some reason we thought it was perfectly fine to have me pick Ross up, swing him around three times and fling him across the auditorium stage, which of course actually meant I dropped him on his ass and watched him get up and limp-run to the far end of the stage as if I threw him.
Poor Ross.
The crazy part – besides trying to make the worst interpretive dance imaginable, the instructors seemed to really love our dance. They were talking about ours more than anyone else’s and we were all worried that we were going to win the free ballet and our parents were going to make us go.
When it was all said and done we luckily lost. But let this be a lesson to you, interpretive dance is kind of, you know, dumb. If a couple of fifth graders can pick it up in ten minutes, try to do it bad and get some praise – it’s a really, really, really stupid “talent” to have.
Fellow Conspirator Matt Dembicki has began to post a counter to my Here’s the Thing… article over at the blog. It’s called The Small Presser and the first issue is all about Xerox vs. small print shops. I suggest you check it out.
Also, I’ve been getting some wonderful submissions for the Washington Spark and began designing the page yesterday. I think I should have no problem filling my first page with some great comics. I also plan on doing a spotlight on an Indy creator or two every week, depending on how much space I have. The plan for now is to actually have an entire editor’s corner where I say a quick blurb and then spotlight some cats. It’s kind of funny – we feel that Elk’s Run and Western Tales of Terror do good numbers but we hope to get them over 3k an issue. The Washington Spark distributes 20k papers and it’s considered small-time. Makes you wonder about comics, doesn’t it?
_________________________
In either the fifth or sixth grade we had instructors from the local dance school come to PS 58s and teach us interpretive dancing. We had a couple of lessons, a workshop of sorts where we acted out some scene in dance. It was kind of odd for an inner city Brooklyn elementary school but PS58 was always a bit progressive.
After the workshop we were tasked to break up into groups of five and come up with our own interpretive dance number. Each group will compete against each other and the winner wins free ballet lessons.
My friends and I didn’t take it too seriously, we were the guys that were cutting violin after all, free ballet lessons was more of a punishment for guys like us. Never-the-less we needed to do something so G, Ross, George, James and I teamed up to create our own interpretive dance.
We needed a theme and since the 1988 Summer Olympics was approaching we figured that would be as good a theme as any. We had our theme and we had our dancers and we had our desire to lose – all that was left to set out and create the worst interpretive dance of all time.
We acted out several Olympic events in a whimsical, fleet-footed manner. First was the torch, where the five of us took turns prancing across the stage and handing an imaginary torch to each other. The last guy to get it went up to James, who was pretending to be the cauldron thing you light at the Olympics, and put the “torch” to James head. James jumped up, arms moving through the air, pretending to be the Olympic flame.
And it only got worse.
Our hurdle dance that was basically leap-frog with dramatic hand-movements. Our gymnastics dance which was basically the lot of us attempting to do cartwheels (to this day I have yet to perform a successful cartwheel – I just don’t think it’s possible). Our marathon dance consisted of us pretending to be really tired while running, taking fake cups of water from peoples hands and shooting them down.
My personal favorite was the shot-put. Instead of pretending to have a shot-put, we made Ross our shot-put. As a reminder, everything bad happened to Ross. Everything. So for some reason we thought it was perfectly fine to have me pick Ross up, swing him around three times and fling him across the auditorium stage, which of course actually meant I dropped him on his ass and watched him get up and limp-run to the far end of the stage as if I threw him.
Poor Ross.
The crazy part – besides trying to make the worst interpretive dance imaginable, the instructors seemed to really love our dance. They were talking about ours more than anyone else’s and we were all worried that we were going to win the free ballet and our parents were going to make us go.
When it was all said and done we luckily lost. But let this be a lesson to you, interpretive dance is kind of, you know, dumb. If a couple of fifth graders can pick it up in ten minutes, try to do it bad and get some praise – it’s a really, really, really stupid “talent” to have.
Labels: mitc
posted by Jason at
12:01 AM
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