Pillow fight…
April 30, 2011, 9:03 PM
First of all, I don’t know why I never posted about this earlier. I must have been really busy. This event is too small for a photo set, and the video coverage is significant, which knocks it out of Photography. In addition, I think I’m going to rethink the way I go about the concept of the year-end-cleanup photo set for Life and Times, so I can’t guarantee that it will get coverage there. So here we are. Better late than never, I suppose.
On April 2, Capitol Improv celebrated International Pillow Fight Day in Washington DC, first at the Capitol building, and later in Dupont Circle. I skipped the Capitol part (and just as well – I’m told that they got kicked out), and caught up with them at Dupont Circle at the appointed time.
However, first thing I did was get ready for this event. See, I figure that if you’re going to be at an event where you know for a fact large objects are going to be moving around at high speed, you might as well bring some protection. So on the way to the Metro, I stopped at the Home Depot store on Georgia Avenue in order to get a pair of safety glasses. The way I figured, it’s like this: I can’t see without my glasses, and I wanted to get close-in photos. So in order to protect the real glasses, I got safety glasses to wear over them. That way, if I got hit, the $3.00 safety glasses would take the hit and not my real glasses (or my eyes for that matter). Maybe I was being over-cautious, but better safe than sorry (and blind).
When I arrived at Dupont Circle, everyone was swinging pillows around at each other:
Then eventually, the pillow fighters were organized, since there were actual structured events involved with this – not just randomly bashing each other over the head with pillows. The first event was a single-elimination tournament. Two people at a time would face off against each other, and beat the heck out of each other with their pillows. Judging was completely arbitrary, as determined on the fly by Bruce Witzenburg.
Facing off:
We have a winner:
And apparently, based on where Bruce’s finger is pointing, it’s the guy in the hat who won (and probably on account of his hat).
Now, to see the back half of the first round in action:
Then in the second round, as in the first round, two participants faced off, and the winner advanced to the next round. The third round was a group fight, with groups of four and five respectively battling it out, and one person from each group advancing to the final round. The criteria for the third and fourth rounds was as arbitrary as the others. The final round was between an eleven-year-old named Jordan, and a man we called “Helmet Guy”:
Pretty cool, if you ask me. After the champion was crowned, we played a different game. The second game that the group played was called “Pillow Zombie Tag”. The group split into two teams. One team was named “Blah”, and the other team was named “Oh God”, seen here:
If not mistaken, “Blah” was on the left, and “Oh God” was on the right in this photo. Bruce then explained the rules to the group. At its core, the game was the classic capture-the-flag game, where the goal was to capture the opposing team’s flag, and bring it back to your team’s camp. However, there was a twist. People could strike a member of the opposing team with their pillow, and they would be frozen in that spot. They could not move until a member of their team struck them with a pillow. If a person struck by the opposing team was carrying the flag, the flag freezes along with the person. A person of the same team then has the option of striking the person and un-freezing them, or taking the flag and running with it, leaving the person frozen.
Bruce probably explained it better than I did. Here he is:
And then here’s Team “Blah” ready to go:
Excellent. And the game is played, seen here from the “Oh God” side of the circle:
As you can see, “Blah” won the game. Still, it was a real hoot seeing people running around Dupont Circle shouting “Blah” and “Oh God”.
And that was pretty much it. As you can see, this was a fun time, and I don’t know why it took me this long to post. Can’t wait until next year’s pillow fight…
Web site: Capitol Improv
Song: A little girl talks about saying a bad word. This video is so cute...
Quote: So there you go, I suppose...