Entries this day: rally_houston_1998

rally houston 1998

16-18 January 1998

After a few weeks of receiving registrations via mail and phone and fax and email, we had 111 youth registrations and 22 adult registrations. I received 7 registrations on the Friday the rally began. Holy cow what a huge rally!

Friday morning I picked up the T-shirts bearing our controversial "Imagine the Cat in the Hat Burning the Flag" title and image of a seedy looking cat holding a lighter. In the background is an American flag except the stars are replaced by a large question mark. I had ordered and picked up 130 shirts.

Friday day Denise and I spent $520 buying a lot of food.

Friday night the people started pouring in. Everything stayed calm and stable, but just slowly wound up and up as more people arrived. At 1am we had a rally virgin opening circle and it went a little long as I couldn't think of what I wanted to say. I think we got it all covered and it was all good.

Opening circle for the whole rally was at 2am, and I tossed Jon W-L out in the middle of the circle and said, "go for it," assuming he knew what to say. So opening circle was a bit shaky, but still fun and funny. At one point, Arlene D was hollering something about something while we were trying to define the No Sex rule. I hollered over toward her from my Pulp Fiction favorite quote list, "tell that bitch to chill! .. Tell her 'chill, bitch, chill!' ... Yolanda! Yolanda! What's Fonzie like? Dassright! he's coool. and that's what we're going to be. we gonna be cooool." Kim S is the only person I saw who noticed and knew what it was from.

After opening circle, double chaos began as I let everyone go at the same time to their touch groups, and no one knew who was in their touch group and it was nuts. The rally had begun like crap and I was feeling a bit responsible. (let this be a lesson if you're designing a rally: give everyone a bead or something that tells what group they're in, *or* send each group out one at a time by calling each individual's name.)

After helping people get to their touch groups, I finally made it to mine and helped Anna M out a bit and we had a great touch group.

I stayed up talking with people and stuff until like 4:30am.

My internal rally-clock woke me up excited after sleeping 3.5 hours; I went to wake up Charlotte, the touch group leader in charge of making breakfast. I found her in the kitchen with her touchgroup and breakfast was practically made!!! Yay!! All the anxiety I felt about the chaotic start of the rally flittered away like happy butterflies.

I bounced around talking to others who had woken up and many who had not slept yet.

Later I was talking to a few advisors outside. We had been talking about emotions and the meaning of life when Charlie G had just brought up the book _Conversations with God_ by Neale Walsch. I told him I hadn't read it, but was interested. He commented that bringing up that book makes people leave the conversation because no one wants to talk about it. "Hmmm," I thought.

Soon Daniel or someone ran up and was all, "Rob! We're playing Ultimate over in the parking lot!"
Cool. As I left to play, Charlie was all, "see- it clears the table because no one wants to talk about it."
My brain jerked back, "what?" Holy moly.. He had just said bringing up the book would clear the table, I promptly disbelieved that and forgot about it and left the table. Wow!

During Ultimate, we had great fun, even playing while the disc had a big crack in it. We even played two short spontaneous games after the disk was broken, claiming the bigger section was worth three-quarters of a point, and I was part of the group playing for one-quarter of a point.

At 2:30 or so, our theme speaker, Warren Apel from Arizona, talked about First Amendment rights, including but not condoning flag desecration. The workshop was well attended, and quite informative. I slept through about 1/2 of it.

I was in YAC meetings for much of the afternoon. We selected the youth staff for this coming SWUUSI. I don't remember everyone who was selected, but I do remember that Maia C and Ashley R are the co-deans, Nathan R is the worship coordinator, Jen C is the mugbook editor, Nick C is the special events coordinator, Adam L is the spirit leader, and that's all I remember. Congratulations to all who were selected!!

Soon we needed to have a YRUU meeting to vote for YAC positions. All the YAC candidates presented their ad-lib speeches and everyone needed to vote.

I had a bit of a logistics problem:

• We needed all the youth to vote for 3 YAC positions.
• People in the kitchen had just gotten vegetarian food ready (after I totally screwed up and didn't have any for the main dinnertime).
• The special event was ready to go.

I felt greatly pleased with how the transition turned out. I announced, "okay! That's all the YAC candidates! Now you get to vote on your favorite 3. And after you vote, you can eat vegetarian in the kitchen!" Everything went smoothly, everyone got to eat, and the special event was inflated. Yay!!!!

From the general youth perspective, I believe the best part of the rally was our special event. Jason Fricke's idea was to rent a "Bouncy Boxing" thing. It's one of those air-filled "moonwalk" deals except the participants wear enormous soft boxing gloves and bounce around and wail on one another.

To see the folded red canvas in the middle of the room slowly swell into a fully huge bouncy boxing ring was incredible. We had not told anyone what was growing to be the special event. I loved it. I never challenged anyone to boxing, but I jumped and jumped about 5 different times with various people. It was the most fun I've had in a long while.

The Bouncy Boxing was there from like 9:15 till just after midnight, when everyone was asked to gather for the worship. The youth had designed another wonderful experience, building the spiritual community to new levels of wonderfulness.

About an hour later, we gently sang our way back to the main hall for random mingling and then the talent show!

Kristian S did a hilarious parody of Marilyn Manson's "Sweet Dreams"
Sean and Steve performed one of their old rally classics, plus "Dead Puppies" (another rally classic) and Sean sang "If I Ever Fall in Love" a capella.
Some youth recited their own emotionally harsh poetry and Mary S dramatized a suicide to Tori Amos' song "Marianne."
I performed "cool and creamy" with Jen C, singing and resulting in whipped cream all over one another. You should have been there!
As we cleaned that up, Aaron I and Kristian S performed Madonna's "Like a Prayer" and some others.
I got to drum for Mike N rapping, *and* Jen C & Dane D did part III of San Antonio Saki, with Kristian S and I lip synching their words and other sound effects. Very funny... especially Kris.
Then Shira (I think) performed her most annoying sound and the show kinda fizzled from there.

Then we had a SWUUSI 1997 dance relapse with the wacky Seasame Street song (I still don't know who performs that) twice!!!! What an incredible energy drain is that song! Then Korn (I don't know what song) was played several times and I stayed up cleaning with some youth for about 1.5 hours. I greatly appreciate their help.

I slept from 4:30am to 6:00am.

We groggily got up at 6 to clean clean clean and amazingly, by 8am, the place was perfect. Closing circle out in the parking lot and I was deeply emotionally touched when I hugged Charlie G and he gave me a beautiful hardback copy of Conversations With God.

What a perfect touch to a perfect weekend!