This post is related to this entry in my dream journal blog.
Yesterday I went to PrideFest, the annual festival put on by The Center, a non-profit organization that provides support and advocacy for the LGBT community in Colorado.
I do have to say that I was a little wary about going to PrideFest. But my horoscope in the paper copy The Denver Post told me to get out and have fun. And... I hate to admit it, but I do listen to horoscopes.
Anyway, the reason I was afraid to go was because I've gone to the Gay Pride Parades in New York City a few times, and they've always been miserable. Maybe it's just the location. Everything takes place down in the Village, where the streets are all cramped and packed. And that kind of environment makes me really claustrophobic.
To be honest with you, I stopped going to parades of any kind in NYC after a while, just because the crowds were so dense and so unruly. People seemed to be out to make everybody else's time a bad time. It was kind of miserable.
So I was nervous heading over to PrideFest. But I can honestly say that yesterday was one of the best days I've had in a long time! PrideFest was relaxing and fun!
The event is being held in and around downtown Denver's Civic Center. The event runs through the weekend. So there is also stuff going on there today.
But it's a lovely event. All around civic center are your usual fair-like booths, selling food, art, clothing, etc. I spent a lot of my time walking around those booths when I first got there -- not so much to look at the booths as to look at the people. Everybody was dressed up colorfully, in rainbow skirts, with rainbow-colored hairstyles, wearing pink wings, rainbow wings, makeup, body paint -- you name it. It was really an eye full!
I had planned to go there and really download as many styles into my memory as I could. But I think it's been such a long time since I've actually gone out looking at people, that my memory was all flabby. I didn't pull too much in.
After walking around at the booths for a bit, I went to one of the concert stages. As far as I could tell, there were four concert stages: a Latino stage, a country music stage, a dance stage, and the center stage, where all the main events were held.
I went to the Latino stage. I watched a guy named Daniel Galindo perform some of his own songs. I liked his musical style a lot. I looked for a website or any info on Daniel Galindo. But I couldn't find anything. I know that he's performing today at noon as well, if anybody gets a chance to see him.
After that I wandered around a little bit more before heading to the Center Stage. I stayed there for pretty much the rest of the day. The first performance I watched was Pride Idol, a karaoke contest for kids under the age of eleven. There were actually a lot of really good performances in that show. I had a lot of fun.
After that, Denver's Drag Queen Nation gave a performance. By that time, the Center Stage audience was packed. Drag Queen Nation's performance was great! A different girl would come out on stage and give her performance, lip syncing to some popular artist and doing a lot of sexy dancing. A lot of people in the crowd -- including me! -- were dancing as well.
My favorite performers were the first girl, who wore this kind of gold lame leotard (I think); a girl who wore a red spandex full bodysuit and a red wig and did some Nikki Minaj; a drag queen and drag king (?) duo who did a Shakira song; and a woman named Victoria Sexton, who came up on stage with two sexy boys and did some really hot dancing.
But my absolute favorite was a girl named Alessandra Stiletta, a super-skinny girl wearing a blue wig, a black tank-top with blue and pink designs, tiny jean shorts, and bright pink lipstick. She did a really sexy and powerful performance! I can't find it on YouTube yet, but here's another nice video of hers.
After that I headed away from the Center Stage. I was about to go into the Dance Stage. But there was actually a line to get in. So I just headed home.
So I think that obviously the girl in my last dream, the girl with the black corset, pink wings, and pink hair, was a combination of a lot of the style that I was so happy to see at PrideFest.
But I think another source for the colored hair in my dream came from this YouTube video, from the ParisModesen channel. The colored hair the girl in my dream had was a lot like the hair coloring patterns you see in the Jean Paul Gaultier segment at the beginning of the video.
Another image that I think came from PrideFest was -- myself in the second dream. In that dream I'm wearing Pampers Underjams, diapers which, for girls, have a largely purple color scheme, and a purple t-shirt.
This partly came from the fact that I was going to, but I did not, wear diapers to PrideFest. A lot of times I just don't feel like being a baby. I just feel like being my regular, old, grody boy self. But I looked around at PrideFest to see if I could find anything adult baby or sissy related. I couldn't find anything. That may simply have been because I wasn't looking hard enough.
Anyway, at Center Stage, during the Pride Idol performance, there was a group of young women -- I'd guess around college aged or thereabouts -- watching the performance, too. They were all kind of butchy-looking, with short hair done up in boyish mohawks, jeans, and so forth. But I was really attracted to them. I mean... I like girls in general. And for each girl's look, there's probably some girl who has that look whom I'll be attracted to.
But there was one girl there wearing a purple sports bra and wearing her bluejeans loose, so that the purple waistband of her underwear showed over them. She had platinum blonde hair with black roots. She just looked really hot. Of course, I would have been happy if she'd taken me home to be her little boy or her little baby forever. But I wasn't going to bug her.
Anyway, I think I appeared in my dream wearing a purple t-shirt and purple diapers specifically so I could be that girl's little baby. We would match, I guess, if I were wearing purple, too!
I think my step-grandmother (who I like a lot and who is very kind) stands, in my dream, for all the insecurities I heap on myself that prevent me from showing myself as who I really am -- even at events where everybody else is showing off who they really are!
But there is another image that influenced this dream. It comes from the Pluggers comic strip, which you can follow on GoComics.com. Actually, like an idiot, I'd forgotten all about this website until this morning. Now that I remember, I'm going to have to follow some of my favorite comic strips on this site.
Anyhow, in yesterday's cartoon, the joke was that Plugger females get their perfume from the samples in magazines.
It's kind of interesting to see the GoComics version of this cartoon. In the paper copy of the Denver Post, where I first saw this cartoon, the image was in black and white.It's interesting to see how the actual color scheme of the GoComics image is purple, like in my dream.
But the cartoon obviously contributed to that statement my grandma made about the boy who'd left behind all his fashion magazines, which all smelled like perfume.
I obviously had a lot of dreams -- a lot of imagery to think about -- last night. But I can't get to it all. The only other thing I'd really like to discuss right now is the pools in my third dream. Those pools definitely come from my having watched the David Cronenberg film eXistenZ.
In one scene in the film, the main characters are taken out to a series of ponds that serve as a breeding ground for aquatic animals that eventually become components for a virtual reality game system.
I like these aquatic animals -- it seems like they are the last really slimy, ugly, gross images that occur in Cronenberg's movies. After eXistenZ, Cronenberg's films -- though still awesome -- seem to lose a lot of that slimy ugliness that's so enjoyable.
I think I wanted to bring these animals into my dream. But all I seemed to get were "ponds" that were more like swimming pools or industrial tanks or something. And even though there were supposed to be animals present in the tanks, I'm pretty sure I never saw any.
Themes from eXistenZ also resonate through my fourth dream, the hospital dream. I walk through a bunch of areas called "exhibits," which is obviously an echo of "eXistenZ." And I stab a needle into a boy's back, which is an echo of the image of people getting "ported" (having the virtual reality system plugged into their backs) in the movie, as well as of images in the movie where people actually get needles poked into their backs.
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