You may recall that my plans to celebrate turning 60 by going to live in an alkali desert for a week were scotched by the inability of my partner in crime to travel with me.

We have regrouped.  There are more than a couple of regional Burns, and we have decided to go ahead and establish our 3 Old Men ritual performance group and start with Alchemy, taking place here in Georgia Oct. 2-5.  We have tickets (more than we need, actually) and are putting together our team.

We are also beginning to move forward with all the practical matters that we would be in the middle of anyway were we still heading to Nevada in 10 weeks, i.e., the labyrinth, staves, and skirts.  We met a couple of weeks ago to discuss these things, and now that I’m not having rotator cuff surgery, I’m ready to get started.

This weekend my lovely first wife and I have been in Raleigh, NC, for a family wedding, and while here we needed to visit some kind of “largest” fabric store for private upholstery reasons.  I’ve already bought muslin to mock up the 3 Old Men skirts cheaply, and I’ve pretty much decided to make them of monks cloth because of its hand and drape, but since I was bored, I messaged the following photos to my fellows:

The fake fur is a Burning Man joke, of course.  I don’t see how people wear anything out there other than loincloths, frankly. The G.I. Joe fleece was likewise a joke.

The psychedelic fabric, though… There is some part of me that can see us standing in the woods of north Georgia, waiting at the entrances of the four-path labyrinth, clad in some pretty freaky skirts.  It doesn’t take it a lot of imagination to assign earth, fire, air, and water to them, either.

Also, I found as I wandered aimlessly around this largest fabric store that there could be many different interesting ways to build these skirts: brocades, sheers, etc.  I finally decided that I needed to get home and actually build the thing first, study how the skirt will move and flow, and then powwow with my fellows on what ritual aspect we want to present.

At any rate, we will now resume updates on the progress towards Alchemy/Burning Man.