In St. Louis today in Tower Grove Park, there were hundreds of thousands of people that came out for the Festival of the Nations. I’ve never attended before, but have always been curious. A family in our Fife and Drum corp., that we’ve only know a couple of months (this is important for much later in this post) is also in a Scottish Pipe Band and they were performing at the Festival. And it is my birthday, so we needed to do something. We decided to go and support them (and stalk them… er I mean watch them) because our whole family had been curious about the Pipe Band they talk about all the time. Plus, if you know anything about me at all, you would know that I am truly 100% obsessed with anything/all things Celtic. First and foremost all things Irish, and well, Scottish is darn close and my husband loves him some Scot. He’s also some odd percentage Scottish and/or Welsh, but don’t ask me how much. You probably shouldn’t ask him either, he really doesn’t know.
Anyway, so off we go to see the pipe band perform. We got there uber early, and by uber early, I mean pretty much 5 hours too early, but we wanted to see other stuff too. I won’t bore you with all the details of the day, but I will show you some highlights.
We did this:
Henna Tatoos
and then we saw this:
The Dance of Life:
Yeah, I got nothing. I can’t even describe this enough to make it real in your mind. You just had to be there. It was….
- Disturbing
- Fascinating
- Creative
- Awkward
- Crazy
But that’s okay. She’s doing “The Dance of Life” – see, her chair even says so. Sorry about her head being cut off in the second photo, my daughter was snapping the photo and she couldn’t quite get past her uhm…. costume.
Yeah, uhm. So anyway, we were there to see the St. Louis Caledonian Pipe Band play. So let’s move on, and not reflect too much on the oddness that was the above two photos.
The St. Louis Caledonian Pipe Band
(oh, and before you ask – those red arrows were not actually above their heads when I took the photos. The dude on the left is Braden, who teaches Ryan and Brie color guard. The dude on the left with that gigantic drum is Dave, his dad. They are some of the coolest people you will ever meet. The whole family actually. Not pictured are Robin, the totally non-musical mom (her words, not mine!) who is actually standing to my left in these photos (don’t look for her, she’s behind the camera lens) and Dakota who is her totally musical son and also in our Fife and Drum corp. who just wasn’t there that day. But don’t worry, I have more to say on him in a minute).
and since you weren’t there with us, I am including a very tiny video clip of them playing. Please don’t mind the dude at the end of the clip that gets in the way. That was all he did the entire time we were standing there. (Ah, but if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all, Nicole.)
Okay, so I said I was going to come back to Dakota, and I meant it and now’s the time. So we are standing there watching the pipe band, and it didn’t take us but a few seconds of them playing to start looking at each other, and by each other, I pretty much mean my kids and I. Not because the pipe band was bad, they so weren’t bad, they were SO good. But that was the problem, it became clear immediately that we had heard them before. Like a couple of times before. In fact, I remembered being obsessed with the group back at the Missouri Tartan Days 2 years ago. I mentioned this to said non-musical mom and she just sort of laughed it off. Remember, we’ve only known them a couple of months… She laughed until I sent her these little captures of history:
I present, my photos from the 2008 Missouri Tartan days (that might actually be somewhere on this blog or my other blog already, but here they are again…)
So see the guy in the last picture… and again in the next photo? That’s her son Dakota. mhmm…. who’s laughing now? And then see the guy playing that gigantic drum in the sixth photo? (second below) – That’s her husband. mhmm…. again, who’s the stalker uhm… I mean fan, now?
So yeah, this is only 8 of about 50 photos we took of the group performing. I’m a huge stalker fan. And that was of course proven again today, while watching them. Sorry I took up such a huge post, but it was worth sharing the story. Plus the different music, food and fun at the Festival of Nations was definitely worth mentioning.
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I’ve noticed that I am left without much time to blog lately. I think that is mostly because I have a tendency to run myself dry and stretch myself like a rubber band that is about to snap. I wish I could say that it would change and I’d suddenly find myself with all this free time, like maybe when the kids go back to school or something. But yeah, I’m being realistic here and I know that when the kids do go back to school, which is like, pretty much right around the corner – I’m going to be spending my time playing catch up on my writing that has been neglected, and some seriously over due editing on one of the manuscripts that is way too many words for my liking.
