28 Apr 09 Our First May Day Celebration!!
This Friday marks Whiskey Rebellion’s first May Day Celebration in Pittsburgh, and I don’t know about you all, but I’m getting really excited!!
There’s a little blurb up on the website that gives the public details about what we are doing on May Day — feel free to use that to disseminate the information to friends, co-workers, strangers on the street, etc. 
For the team members, here’s the nitty-gritty details for the day:
Dawn
- Location: Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in front of the statue of Columbus at the corner of Schenely Dr and Frew St.
- Parking: Park on Frew St. It should be free and plentiful at dawn.
- Arrival time: Arrive by 6 AM to allow time for us to get set up.
- Performance time: 6:30 - 7:00 AM
- Plan: We’ll have some speeches, dance 4-5 dances, sing the May Day song, eat some May Day cake, and watch the sun come up. Good times.
Breakfast
- After the dawn dancing, we plan to walk over to Pamela’s in Oakland for breakfast. It’s about a fifteen minute walk, and it opens at 7:30 AM so that should be about right once we finish dancing and walk over there. Since we are arriving just as they open we should avoid the inevitable line.
After-Breakfast Guerilla Dancing
After breakfast, we plan to do some guerilla dancing around Oakland. We’re trying not to over-plan this part of the day — we have a rough plan on where we’ll go, and we’ll probably do a dance or two at each location, but where we’ll be when and how long we will go for depends on people’s stamina and other constraints. Here are the rough plans for where we might be dancing after breakfast, in an order that makes sense as we make our way back toward our starting location:
- Cathedral of Learning
- Main Library in Oakland
- Phipps Conservatory, in the garden
- CMU campus
Dinner
We haven’t discussed this, but would people like to plan to get together for a May Day Eve dinner out, say at the Church Brew Works? I was thinking about going there with Tom and Lina ~5 PM, and we’d be happy to have company!!
May Day Eve Contra Dance:
We are planning on doing a dance during the break at the contra dance that evening. Amarilis is playing, and Ted Crane from Ithaca (a former morris dancer!) is calling, so it should be good times. I’m not sure exactly when the break happens, but people should probably plan on getting there by 9 PM at the latest.
