September 25th, 2005
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More festival fun
Unfortunately, having a late summer vacation and several other distracting events transpiring in my life have led me to miss Super Yosakoi for the second year in a row, in addition to the Shiba-Daijingu fresh ginger matsuri. However, I did manage to make it to Honmachi’s autumn festival again this year, helping out a little more than I did last year.
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There was the requisite protecting of the children’s omikoshi and taiko tours, the former of which being quite difficult as the amount of strappling young lads roughly the same height was rather scant, thus requiring me to support a good deal of the weight at an awkward angle with my wrist turned down. However, all was good and after I made a couple unexpected cheers in little-boy Japanese to rally the troops, I was receiving my fair share of obligatory whacks with the taiko drumsticks.
More fidgety and restless than usual, I chose to forego the sitting around with the village seniors while drinking copious amounts of complimentary alcohol, and ran back and forth between my house next to the park doing laundry. I also aided the ladies in creating a mammoth vat of curry sauce by slicing up roughly three dozen onions and carrots.
On Saturday the festivities came to an early end as typhoon 17 wouldn’t be tabled any longer and a lashing rain came overnight after the last lilting bon odori (a series of traditional Japanese folkdances). So I spent the better part of the morning hauling supplies back to various garages around the town with a rambling old cart. The entire process of teardown (or “striking the set” as it was called in my theatre days) took about five hours, but I silently slipped away at the sound of the lunch bell as the unkempt floors of my apartment were nagging at my conscience.
In I went out to see Fantastic Four, which I decided to try despite the B user rating on Yahoo! Movies, because it was the best thing in the theatres and I was hoping it would be like Spider-Man. But of course, that was hoping for far too much, as it turned out to be not much more than an eighty-four minute long one-liner with the occasional exploding building. Even the “action” sequences seemed rare and underwhelming. Oh well, the comic book companies are just trying to get at that disposable income of us socially-challenged Gen X-ers. Too bad they won this time. Damn you Mr. Fantastic! Why do you have to look so uncannily like a cross between someone I went to school with and Jon Stewart?
