[Christa Sperry has been involved in the Burning Man community since 2005. She is a mentor and Youth Minister at FreedomHill in Maryland, always trying to encourage the beautiful and absurd in the future leaders of the world. During the summer months, she throws locally grown produce at the urbanites for a fair price. When in Black Rock City, you can find her at BMIR 94.5 coordinating events, talking smack, and spilling drinks.]

This past March at FreedomHill, the Sudbury model school where I work, some of the kids were asking me about Burning Man:

What is it?

Where is it?

Can kids go?

What do you do there?

I attempted to answer these questions as best I could with a little help from one of the 9 year old boys who went for his first time in 2009. We told them about the interactive art aspect, how everything there happens because people want it to happen (not because someone is telling them to do it), community building, self-reliance, and burning things to the ground. This idea was really not very foreign to them as it is pretty much how they spend their days at FreedomHill (well, minus burning things to the ground) so they were immediately intrigued. At that point the conversation naturally led to the question, “Wouldn’t that be cool if there was a Burning Man just for kids?”. Wouldn’t it? Why not?

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So I always thought that Mardi Gras equaled Girls Gone Wild. Period.

I was so, so wrong.

I would get mad, working at the Burning Man festival, when others more wet behind the ears than I and my dusty cranky faction would say, “Yeah, Burning Man’s great! It reminds me of Mardi Gras!”

You don’t know what you’re talking about, my subconscious would scream. Have you any idea what it takes to live in a van for 2 months out of the year, in one of the harshest environments on Earth, laboring like a hard-time prisoner and eating nothing but Pabst Blue Ribbon and bacon? … Do you have any inkling as to the effort involved in building a fantastical city out of THIN AIR for FIFTY THOUSAND PEOPLE, and that we have to TEAR IT ALL BACK DOWN TO NOTHING?

(The subconscious, you see, can become quite the Bill Hicks-level righteous aggravationist when faced with 10-hour days under the hot sun in hangovery dust storms.)

But you know what? On Friday and Saturday nights? When we’ve built the city infrastructure and every-thousand ticketholders have come and added the bells and whistles and finally put down the tools to suit up in their finery and go out on the town and look at what other people have been working on all year in their spare time? It DOES remind me of Mardi Gras. Now that I’ve been to Mardi Gras as a New Orleans resident, I get it.

dear Pan, please bless the proceedings and continue scaring the little children. Amen

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