Yurt

This weekend, there were yurts in the Sony Center. I heard about them through "Culture Radio" one night. As described on the radio, authors read excerpts from their books to people sitting in the yurts. Readings happened every hour on the hour from Thursday until Sunday. I was first attracted to the event because of its possibility of being similar to the Timpanogos Story Telling Festival from back home. I never really "attended" the festival, but I caught the last two performances of an evening after a night at Ben's house, which was a block away from the Scera Shell. It was good.

So I mustered up the strength to leave the house and trek out into the frigid winter wasteland an hour before class started, to see if I could see a reading. I forgot that I'm in Germany, and should have expected that the doors were shut exactly at the top of the hour according to the official nuclear clock in Braunschweig.

Being shut out made me want to attend a reading even more.

Oh, and one of the tents was the infoyurt, where they had the schedules for who was reading in which tent, as well as books for sale from the authors. The infoyurt was warm, and that also contributed to my desire to attend a reading.

So I planned to go on Saturday. I invited a friend from my German class, and got Jordan and another friend to go with us. Due to a spontaneous omelet breakfast, we missed the train for the 2:00 reading. We arrived 2 minutes before the 3:00 reading, and the tents were all full. Shoot. Now I really wanted to go. So we went to the infoyurt, and tried to register for one of the readings that day. The only one was the reading of a children's book. I signed us up, and we went shopping in the Arkaden next door.

Unfortunately, we were a little late in arriving back to the yurts, and in a wild chaos, I ended up jumping into the yurt for the children's book reading. I wasn't sure where Jordan was.. He said he was in the yurt... I couldn't see him. We were separated.

And as my eyes adjusted to the darkness in the yurt, I realized that I was stuck directly across from the door in a yurt full of children and their parents.

The author was dressed in a satin suit with flowers, and sported a frizzy doo that was back from the future. I also felt the urge to whip out my weedwacker and trim his eyebrows.

He began his presentation with by impressively sticking his hand into his magic satin flowery pants, wiggling his fuzzy eyebrows, and producing... a hand. Five fingers were produced from his other pocket.

I had overestimated the entertainment factor of the yurt reading for those over four years old. Across the tent, I could see in the eyes of a father, who was accompanying his daughter and wife, that he was also regretting agreeing to enter the yurt.

However it was warm. In fact, it was very warm. Warm air was blasted into the yurts for temperature control, and the chair I had chosen was empty when I dashed in because it was right in front of the vent blasting warm air.

For the next fifteen minutes, the man performed a variety of other silly tricks. I am almost certain that the kids present weren't laughing at his tricks, but because of his eyebrows. Which I also found mildly amusing.

The climax of the half-hour event was the reading of the story entitled "Mr. Cloud and Marie's Weekend with Dad," in which a the parents of a young girl, Marie, have a fight and the father moves out. The story concludes happily, with magical Mr. Cloud telling the girl that although the parents have almost nothing in common, they do have a common love for the little girl. I wasn't convinced. Perhaps I'm too skeptical.

I was also a little confused about the title.. In the story, the girl never goes to visit the father for the weekend. Perhaps this was a simple oversight by the furry-eyebrowed author. Or perhaps it wasn't. Maybe the title was a reference to the last weekend that the girl had with her father, before he moved out. After the departure of dad, mom and the girl never heard of him again.

However, the end made me happy because I could leave the yurt. I got up from my seat in front of the furnace, and walked across the tent to the door, avoiding eye contact with the parents, who probably thought I was there to kidnap one of their kids. Or perhaps they thought I was just a father who hadn't had contact with his kid ever since he had been kicked out...

It turned out that Jordan had jumped into another yurt, and had listened to a 30-minute reading of a book on global warming. I'm sure people promptly forgot about the global status when they exited the yurt and entered the frigid winter wasteland.