What's a pirate's favorite place to shop?
TARRRRRRGET!
Get it?
I went to New Orleans a few weekends ago for a bachelorette party. It was standard fare for a bachelorette party—pretty girls, trolling for free drinks, getting quite a few, and buying their own as well, special shirts for the bride-to-be and her cronies announcing their partying existence in the city, too much food, and stories that can only be partially shared due to their R-rated nature.
All in all, a great time.
We arrived late in the evening (well, okay, late for a Midwesterner, not really late for Bourbon Street) and checked in to the hotel, giving ourselves a few minutes of primping before we hit the Quarter. As the elevator slid slowly from floor to lower floor, three silly girls chattering in the car, we thought we were prepared for anything. Then the floor stopped on floor 8.
As the door opened, we shifted around to make room for new passengers, then looked up to see who might be joining us. And….pirates.
That's right, I said PIRATES. Dressed to the nines, looking like they were ready for an elaborate costume ball—makeup, props such as swords and eye patches and hats. We must have looked stunned, standing there in the elevator dressed in our best "going out" attire, staring back at the pirates.
"Oh, we're waiting for the rest of our party…you go ahead," one pirate said politely. The door closed and my good friend Aimee muttered "wait for it….wait for it…." The rest of us looked at her with wide eyes. Finally she determined we were a sufficient distance from the pirates' floor to blurt out with an ecstatically excited look on her face, "Pirate Convention!"
That's right my friends, PyrateCon 2009 was happening in New Orleans that weekend, and it made the city even more colorful (is that possible?) on our weekend trip. Maybe you're wondering (like I was) what one might do at a Pirate Convention. I've been to work conferences, where the days were filled with sessions about (in my case) technical writing, editing, advances in software, and showing off completed projects to your peers. I've got friends who attend the Star Wars convention every year, and seen both documentaries and parodies about ComicCon—I can imagine that there is plenty to do at those types of conventions.
Well, here's the PyrateCon 2009 schedule, but I kind of got the feeling that the main point of the Pirate Convention was to dress and act as a pirate. We saw pirates with live birds riding on their shoulders, pirates decked out like the Pirates of the Caribbean cast (seriously, you can't get any more creative than Johnny Depp?) and pirates that looked like the undead (I bet you've never heard of a vampirate).
I've told this story way too many times already since I've returned from my trip (you know how I love an audience). The typical response so far has been, "but why would anyone want to dress like a pirate?" This is what I have been thinking about this week.
Well, not why would a person dress as a pirate, but rather, why WOULDN'T one?
My hairdresser would probably assume I was starting a new hobby if I told her this story—she is constantly amused at the variation in my activities from day to day. But really, what's wrong with wanting to dress like a pirate? Why should that be considered weird? When I run down the list of my hobbies, I sometimes feel a little sheepish, because, as I often preface the list, they are sort of a list of the activities of a retired Midwestern woman…knitting, dog showing, fiddle-playing. Recently to that list I have added both indoor and outdoor volleyball. I also consider my obsessive reading and contributing to Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter a hobby.
People laugh when I give them this list—and some people poke fun. Not in a mean way, and I do love the attention, so I'm ready to handle it. When talking about my Twittering last week, a few of my workmates said things like "Twittering? What is that?" and "That's a lame hobby." I laugh, but I also ask them why they would say such a thing? Then I remind them of their own hobbies (fishing in competitions at 5:00 a.m. on Lake of the Ozarks--in a special fishing jersey, with sponsors, no less--or talking incessantly about fantasy sports, or traveling to Tool concerts all over the nation). Why is my hobby (or the pirates!) any weirder, or less acceptable, than any of these other things?
It isn't. We're all weird. My best friend from 4th grade and I used to pride ourselves on our weirdness—embracing the strange and the interesting things that made us different.
I've been thinking quite a bit this week about how hard it is for most of us to step outside of our own experiences and look at life from a new perspective—from someone else's viewpoint. To stand in someone else's shoes for a minute, and understand what the world looks like from a different vantage point. I like to think that I can do that, at least passably well. I'd like to do better.
So, with that, I'll leave you with a few photos of me with some pirates…who you can tell worked tirelessly and for many hours to prepare themselves for their week in New Orleans this year. Oh, and if you need to hire some undead pirates for a party, check out the Dark Dwellers on MySpace. That'd be a conversation topic for your event, for sure.
TARRRRRRGET!
Get it?
I went to New Orleans a few weekends ago for a bachelorette party. It was standard fare for a bachelorette party—pretty girls, trolling for free drinks, getting quite a few, and buying their own as well, special shirts for the bride-to-be and her cronies announcing their partying existence in the city, too much food, and stories that can only be partially shared due to their R-rated nature.
All in all, a great time.
We arrived late in the evening (well, okay, late for a Midwesterner, not really late for Bourbon Street) and checked in to the hotel, giving ourselves a few minutes of primping before we hit the Quarter. As the elevator slid slowly from floor to lower floor, three silly girls chattering in the car, we thought we were prepared for anything. Then the floor stopped on floor 8.
As the door opened, we shifted around to make room for new passengers, then looked up to see who might be joining us. And….pirates.
That's right, I said PIRATES. Dressed to the nines, looking like they were ready for an elaborate costume ball—makeup, props such as swords and eye patches and hats. We must have looked stunned, standing there in the elevator dressed in our best "going out" attire, staring back at the pirates.
"Oh, we're waiting for the rest of our party…you go ahead," one pirate said politely. The door closed and my good friend Aimee muttered "wait for it….wait for it…." The rest of us looked at her with wide eyes. Finally she determined we were a sufficient distance from the pirates' floor to blurt out with an ecstatically excited look on her face, "Pirate Convention!"
That's right my friends, PyrateCon 2009 was happening in New Orleans that weekend, and it made the city even more colorful (is that possible?) on our weekend trip. Maybe you're wondering (like I was) what one might do at a Pirate Convention. I've been to work conferences, where the days were filled with sessions about (in my case) technical writing, editing, advances in software, and showing off completed projects to your peers. I've got friends who attend the Star Wars convention every year, and seen both documentaries and parodies about ComicCon—I can imagine that there is plenty to do at those types of conventions.
Well, here's the PyrateCon 2009 schedule, but I kind of got the feeling that the main point of the Pirate Convention was to dress and act as a pirate. We saw pirates with live birds riding on their shoulders, pirates decked out like the Pirates of the Caribbean cast (seriously, you can't get any more creative than Johnny Depp?) and pirates that looked like the undead (I bet you've never heard of a vampirate).
I've told this story way too many times already since I've returned from my trip (you know how I love an audience). The typical response so far has been, "but why would anyone want to dress like a pirate?" This is what I have been thinking about this week.
Well, not why would a person dress as a pirate, but rather, why WOULDN'T one?
My hairdresser would probably assume I was starting a new hobby if I told her this story—she is constantly amused at the variation in my activities from day to day. But really, what's wrong with wanting to dress like a pirate? Why should that be considered weird? When I run down the list of my hobbies, I sometimes feel a little sheepish, because, as I often preface the list, they are sort of a list of the activities of a retired Midwestern woman…knitting, dog showing, fiddle-playing. Recently to that list I have added both indoor and outdoor volleyball. I also consider my obsessive reading and contributing to Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter a hobby.
People laugh when I give them this list—and some people poke fun. Not in a mean way, and I do love the attention, so I'm ready to handle it. When talking about my Twittering last week, a few of my workmates said things like "Twittering? What is that?" and "That's a lame hobby." I laugh, but I also ask them why they would say such a thing? Then I remind them of their own hobbies (fishing in competitions at 5:00 a.m. on Lake of the Ozarks--in a special fishing jersey, with sponsors, no less--or talking incessantly about fantasy sports, or traveling to Tool concerts all over the nation). Why is my hobby (or the pirates!) any weirder, or less acceptable, than any of these other things?
It isn't. We're all weird. My best friend from 4th grade and I used to pride ourselves on our weirdness—embracing the strange and the interesting things that made us different.
I've been thinking quite a bit this week about how hard it is for most of us to step outside of our own experiences and look at life from a new perspective—from someone else's viewpoint. To stand in someone else's shoes for a minute, and understand what the world looks like from a different vantage point. I like to think that I can do that, at least passably well. I'd like to do better.
So, with that, I'll leave you with a few photos of me with some pirates…who you can tell worked tirelessly and for many hours to prepare themselves for their week in New Orleans this year. Oh, and if you need to hire some undead pirates for a party, check out the Dark Dwellers on MySpace. That'd be a conversation topic for your event, for sure.
Vampirate! (Watch out Karen!)
The Dark Dwellers
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