Banjo as DC11

Tomorrow morning about 10 I leave for Washington, DC, for our 11th annual DCBash.  I will spend the next 4 days with 50 friends.  We will go sightseeing, we will eat, we will give each other presents.  We will make bad jokes and sing loud.  We will make tin foil hats, which has become a tradition.  We will drink cold beverages.  We will forge new friendships and reinforce old ones.  We will shop.  We will congratulate each other on lifes victories, and we will sympathize with those who have had rough patches in the past year.  I will play a little music;  alone if nobody hauls an instrument along, with others if I can.

But back to the tin foil hats.

The Tin  Foil Hat joke is a long-running gag in my trivia forum.  I cannot remember what started it; only that we've been making foil hat jokes for years and that they're still funny.  It occured to me a few years ago that we might be able to have a little hands-on fun with this at our annual face-to-face get together.  I went to the Dollar Store and picked up half a dozen rolls of aluminum foil, and started handing people lengths of it.  Keep in mind that I did this about 11:00 at night;  the party was in full swing and my oh my the beer was cold!  People looked at me like I was nuts, at first.  And then the spark of creativity fell and within minutes 45 adults were nattily coiffed in tin foil hats.  Not just beanies, mind you.  There was a hat shaped like a swan, and there was a fez.  There was a cowboy hat on the guy from Texas, and a baseball cap on our rabid Sox fan.  The classics were well-represented:  a gladiator helmet, the winged cap of Mercury, a pharoah's towering crown, a unicorn horn artfully twisted.  Mickey Mouse ears.  A Canadian toque. A jaunty beret.  A flapper-style cloche worthy of a Paris runway.  Each creation was fantastic, and fun, from the simplest to the most complex. Fifteen minutes later the room was truly rolling with laughter, and we eagerly welcomed the each addition to our pageant of sparkling silliness. 

It doesn't take much to find fun, if you know where to look for it.  Tomorrow, I will see these folks again, and yes, I am arriving with 6 rolls of foil in my bag of stuff.  Who knows what we'll come up with this year?

I'll be back Monday.

Banjo as )(@#&_!&_@#%){*

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