A little story from PSG

 

 

 

There's no jiu jitsu in this. Names changed to protect the innocent.

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I was on the staff radio at an event, and the facilitator of a major evening drum-centric ritual had locked her keys in the car with all of her drums and other equipment in it.

She had a family member at home Fedex her the spare, and it was supposed to arrive "sometime" during that day.  If we were lucky. We were out in the middle of nowhere.

The rit was scheduled for 6pm, and she was semi-hysterical all day long.

She spent the entire morning and afternoon repeatedly calling staff up at the farmhouse and asking if her keys had arrived yet, and repeating with deadly earnestness, "PLEASE call the SECOND they get here. PLEASE. The very second. I really mean it. I'll send a runner up to get them. This is vitally important. PLEASE. Do you understand?" And tireless repetitive versions of same. (all the staff members have FRS radios on, and all campers in our vicinity can overhear them. Whatever you say on radio is going to be heard by every single staff member as well as about 2/3 of the general festival population. So we were all listening to this all day long.)

On approximately the eight-thousandth rep of her plea, one of the staff at the farmhouse responded, "Oh, yeah- your keys are here. Been here for a while. Want me to bring them down with me when I haul the dinner stuff down to the valley?"

There was dead silence on the radio for a very long, pregnant moment.

You could just feel the entire population of the valley (nearly 2,000 that year) hold its collective breath.

Now, you have to realize that the facilitator, Lou, is a drumming Fire Goddess with a volcanic temper and a positively acid tongue. I was sitting there alone in my tent with my radio, wheezing breathlessly with laughter because I was picturing all three hundred pounds, swirling red muumuu and wild arm-length afro hair of her, considering and discarding various responses and trying to come up with one that was okay to say over the air (again, most of the camp was listening, and anyone who knew Lou was holding their breath waiting for the violent shitstorm to unleash). The longer the silence stretched, the harder I was laughing.

A very, very long moment later, she finally said, in a very carefully neutral and quiet voice, "No, Fran, actually that's not okay. I'm sending someone up to get them right now."