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• The Seven Deadly Sins: Have you been putting them off?

To answer a question that I've found myself asked so often, as to have almost lost my sense of humor on the subject - no, I'm not really a devil worshipper. Café Satan is an amateur improvisational theatre group, or rather would be if I could ever get some real participation. To say exactly where I first got the idea would be difficult; where do running jokes begin? Does one ever know? Part of what gave the idea life, I think, was my one time interest in a one time festival of the interactive arts and general creative potluck called "Burning Man". You may have noticed that I didn't insert a link at that point. This was not an oversight on my part.

The Cafe was originally intended to be a camp for that particular event, in part created in mockery of the unusually clueless commentary to be found in this article (*), but the concept has since evolved into something slightly different. I have, for reasons which should become very clear if you travel the section of the Halls of Eternal Disbelief I've entitled "Ninnies on Parade", become greatly disenchanted with the party on the Playa, and I certainly don't see it as being a promising place to do any kind of theatre. Theatre should, in at least some small way, get the audience to examine its preconceptions. When I see a group of people fly into a massed hysterical screaming rage because, for example, I point out why setting up a magnesium bonfire is a really bad idea, I'm left with no room for reasonable doubt as to just how much room for dissent there isn't in the Burning Man subculture. If the people we'd be dealing with can't handle something that generally uncontroversial, guess what will happen if you really start to challenge their core values?

Why spend ... what, is it up to $300, yet? And travel 2000 miles, just to be abused by a group of people who are frequently under the influence of some controlled substance? Meaning that even if they genuinely did become as open minded and tolerant as they like to pretend to be, they still wouldn't bring much in the way of mental focus to any event? From the point of view of an amateur who'd like to become a better amateur, if somebody isn't quite there, then I don't know what his applause means, and I learn little from doing what I can to earn it. While I'm up on stage? Even at the beginner's level I find myself at, I can sense the reality of the role the audience plays in the performance, the way it is as much a dialogue between the cast and the audience as it is anything else. How can one play well off of a deadened room? How can one grow by doing so, or find much joy in the experience?

Perhaps this is a matter of what it is that one goes to an event like Burning Man for. If I have to watch my step more than I would while transacting business at home; if I have fewer opportunities to express myself freely and without an undue level of fear; if I find myself connecting in a less comfortably spontaneous way than I would back in Chicago, then I'm left with an absurdity - I've just travelled 2000 miles to get to a place I'd have good reason to depart from, just to begin a 2000 mile journey back to where I started. As for the naked girls? Yes, some of them are very easy on the eyes, but I think that you will find that where there is little genuine affection, after a while there is little genuine desire. Beauty itself ceases to be felt, and so it ceases to matter. All that remains is the degradation of the human character by the pursuit of that which is dying in the chase.

My thought is that we'd stick with local gatherings, for now. Let's not even call them "burns". Just call them "interactive art festivals". Period. Or better still, don't call them anything at all - let one of those events just be a group of friends having a creative good time on a camping trip, and don't ask for the experience to be anything more than that.