Cultural Weekend!

Culture. Art. A meeting of some of the most creative minds in our youth today. How could I ever be fooled into thinking Falcon Cultural weekend would have anything to do with the above statements. No matter how much experience I have with such things, my ingenuity always seems to get the best of me. And as always, I’m sorely disappointed.
What should have been an exciting, inspiring, educational weekend turned out to be a let-down. Don’t get me wrong, the weekend was exciting. But more in the “Fear Factor” and “Survivor” sense. Instead of searching for inspiration, we were all searching for bugs in our food. Your reporter was lucky enough to find the leg of a praying mantis in his mashed potato and ants in his strawberry jam. Appetising. But this was all forgotten as the search for drinkable water (or any potable liquids) became our main concern. I mean, I knew that 60% of the world’s potable water problems are in Africa, I just didn’t know they were talking about Falcon alone! We passed many hours in thirst, desperately waiting for the tuckshop to open so we could stock up on warm cokes, our only means of salvation. But this too was a mission since the tuckshop’s open hours changed daily and not a single resident Falcon boy knew at what time it opened. I mean, whilst others are forced to learn the school song and the war-cries and all that “essential” stuff, the answers to life-threatening questions such as these are met with mumbles of “I dunno”.
But I suppose this struggle for survival brought the participants together. No matter what school or what part of the country you came from, the need for food and water drew us together. It was the utopian society that Ngugi spoke of when he said, “…even if a bean should fall to the ground, we will split it amongst ourselves.”

The workshops were interesting to say the least. I took part in the drama workshop. And I prepared a lot for it. I spent the week watching some of the best movies with the most amazing acting seen by man eg Spiceworld to get tips and pointers. I arrived all ready to act my heart out. And that I did. As an elephant! Apparently, acting has become too focused on being good and portraying interesting situations. It’s time to go back to our roots and crawl around with animal masks cawing and coo-cooing and roaring as we once did in kindergarten.
I had the intense pleasure of walking around with a 20 tonne elephant’s mask on and a pillow in my ass (not literally in my ass Julia) and perform a somewhat arousing dance while my castmembers sang “I feel pretty”. Interesting to say the least. Those of you who weren’t there, be glad that you’ll never have to witness such agony in your lives (unless someone forces you to watch Legally Blonde 2 again).
The other workshops produced pretty much the same comments. Except for writing, but no one really cares about writers unless they die in tragic accidents or marry super-celebrities. And I think it’s safe to say those are not likely to happen to our handful of novelists.

So maybe I am being a bit unfair. The weekend wasn’t entirely bad. The best part of the whole experience were the amazing people that were there. There were the CBC guys and…um….yeah, the CBC guys. Kidding! Shout out to all my HIS friends: Yazzi, Lily, Leelolaulela (lali), Pistis and of course, (cue the music) Maria! Maria! Maria! Had a blast with you girls!
Maria, sneaking around, crouching in dark corners, running from security guards and physics classrooms would not have been fun with anybody else. Really miss you.
And now I have school. Merda!