Observance 08/01/2010 8:00pm

I know you don’t want to think about it yet, but we’re already nearing the tail end of summer. By September, the occasional chill will creep into the air. Sunset will nudge its way earlier into the evening. You’ll notice the first brownish leaves drifting toward the sidewalk, and panic will seize your heart. (Or maybe that’s just me). There are so many summertime activities you haven’t accomplished yet! You never made it to Valleyfair! You neglected to go tubing, you only camped that one weekend, and you still haven’t biked the entirety of the Grand Rounds. End of Summer Fail. But we’re not there yet. No, first we get to roll around in the glorious month of August. August is my favorite month of the year. It is the month of my birth, the month of ripening tomatoes, the steamiest exhalations yet of summer’s heat, the season’s apex—everything reaching its fullest, ripest, hottest pinnacle. It is an orgasm. And it is the month of the Fringe. It’s also, fittingly, the month of one of the most transformative experiences of my young life: Burning Man. Burning Man is, like the Fringe, a ritual annual festival that attracts artists, freaks, weirdos, and cubicle workers who want to be freaky and weird for about one week per year. All the rules governing the way you spend the rest of the year—the amount of sleep you get, the amount of booze/drugs you consume, the amount of art you consume, the miles per week that you traverse on your bicycle, the number of strangers with whom you have mind-bending conversations, your average number of daily genitals sightings—all go out the window. The pace of the rest of the year, the rest of your life, abruptly upshifts into some frenzied gear, and you cram your eyes and heart full of all the life and energy they can stand, and then you subsist on it as you coast gently through the next 11 months, which operate largely at a sustainable, reasonable, responsible level. Thousands of people pour galaxies of energy into a brief, fierce act of creation, and then, as a community, we burn it all down. It doesn’t, cannot last. It’s a life cycle unto itself, a time to come together and build a thing with all the life force we can muster, observe it in awe for one shining moment, and then burn it to the ground. And go back to our cubicles renewed. There is something about this time of year, something that makes human, expressive, artistic energy burst into ripeness alongside crops and gardens, and you find these ritual celebrations of it all over the place—theater, art, and music festivals everywhere you turn. I know I’m not the only one who loves these brief weeks more than the peaceful, reflective winter holidays, more than hope-giving spring. These are the weeks I feel most like myself, the most alive, the most awake. I guess in this blog I’ll talk about that—about why and how this particular ritual specific to theater and Minneapolis, this festival, endows the spirit with the sense of somehow being more real, more awake in the world. Let the celebration begin.