Semblance of a social life

Last weekend, Vincent and Florian took me with them to a party at the farm where Vincent's brother works. Florian had warned me that the brother, who was 26 (two years older than Vincent) was often mistaken for his younger brother because he was such a dreamer.

The brother met us outside and showed us into the party barn. It was dark; they were screening a documentary about a non-violent protest in India. The fifteen or so people there were watching the film projected onto a screen, but we sat on bales of hay behind the mac used to play the DVD, so we got a double view. Two other features of the barn jumped out at me immediately: they had turntables and there was a huge, rainbow-colored butterfly kite attached to the wall next to the screen. I couldn't figure out what the protest in the movie was for, despite the fact that most of it was in English. There were various Indian and international people giving interviews about how lovely it was that fifteen thousand people from all over the world had come, and about the importance of non-violence. Perhaps my favorite interviewee was an American woman: she was white, fortyish, blond, and had a red bindi smudged across most of her forehead.

Despite how extraordinarily compelling the movie was, it was hard to focus on it, because there were people milling about taking soup out of a steaming pot on the table in front of us and then sipping it out of huge bowls. Further, there was an approximately seven-year-old boy running around chasing multiple cats with a piece of yarn. When the movie ended and the lights were put back on, we realized that the barn was filled with smoke from a fire in a metal trash bin that served as a heater. Vincent's bro and a friend scrambled to find a ladder to open up a few windows near the roof. The seven-year-old skipped over to a Yamaha keyboard and put on one of the pre-programmed jam beats, over which he started playing sounds with the keys. He soloed for awhile until the adult party guests wandered over, a few at a time, to fool around with the different beats and sounds. (There was no one around to get my Ferris Bueller reference--ach, ach, ach, ach, ach, bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh.) Eventually someone put on vinyl, too, and hooked up the mac to make weird images to go with the sounds (like windows media player does). Then, with the moving images projecting onto the movie screen, about five people started an interpretive dance party right in front of the screen.

It was the hippest party I've been to since the Tupperware party with old British ladies at Jocelyne's house.