Saturday, April 16, 2011

Not quite an unqualified success

You may rightly ask yourself why the hell I am publishing a photograph of the back of a random person.  You may rightly ask yourself why the hell I am standing on a planter to do so.

This is why:


Now you are probably saying to yourself Self, Sabra has finally lost it.  But you'd be wrong on that, 'cause I lost it years ago.

See, this is my documentation of my failed attempt to be part of a flash mob.  See, a few weeks ago I logged on to Facebook to find one of my high school chums had added me to a group called San Antonio Flash Mob.  As of today, there are 1264 people in this group.  You can tell from that video, even though you can't see too much, that there aren't any 1264 folks there.  Apparently, a lot of people told Mary, who seems to have been the brains behind it, that they'd be there, really they would...and then today started calling her with excuses.  Me, I wasn't sure if I could do it or not, and I wound up being too late for rehearsal, but I ran into Mary on her way toward the designated place and so walked with her.  We chatted for a little bit and then she decided to go check on the musicians.  I should have stayed right there.  But I thought we planned to be closer to the stage, and since Clifton, who's Mary's partner and also heavily involved in planning, started making his way to the stage I decided to follow...Got split, but wound up by a large planter by a couple of guys with white t-shirts.  Clifton materialized long enough to hand them a couple of these stencils:
and the streamers, and then disappeared.  So I figured, well, I've found at least two people who are part of the flash mob; I'll stay here.  Only, obviously, we were too far away.

But God bless everybody involved, they tried their damnedest.  If you managed to suspend your WTF reaction to that video for more than a few seconds, you'll see our biggest problem--the people on the stage never shut up.  There was a metal band there and we had to wait for their set to end.  And then it ended and they put on canned mariachi music and someone started talking.  So when our real mariachis started playing and people started singing, it didn't get much notice.  Which is kind of the whole freaking point of a flash mob.

I don't blame the organizers for this, really.  They were trying to do this somewhere easily accessible, during Fiesta, and since it was during Fiesta they wanted it to be somewhere free to access (the other popular option was King William Fair, but you have to pay for that these days).  Only, apparently half of San Antonio decided to come out to Fiesta de los Reyes in Market Square.

I know at least one person had a decent camera and was much closer, so when that video gets published I'll share it.  In the meantime I'll leave y'all with a photo of my companions.  I have no idea who the hell they are, but in true Fiesta spirit, they were quite helpful & held Marie so I could get on and then later off the planter.  Thanks, dudes!

Hopefully I'll do a better job at the next one.  Or else I'll never be able to join 2007.

Oh, and this is what we were singing:

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