August Moon Weekend.

This past weekend was the August Moon festival in Chinatown. The assumption is that it is called August Moon based on the chinese holiday (Jung chow jeet) and that it on the western calendar date of August 15th for…..convenience?

Ironically we actually celebrated the July holiday this weekend as the Chinese Holidays go by a Lunar calendar. (The July holiday is the Chinese Halloweeen. I would assume August/Harvest Moon/ Jung chow jeet is a month away.)

So I ‘ve begun to wonder…. if the Dragon boat festival can be on a sunday that is pretty close to the actual holiday… why not the August Moon festival? Why don’t we have a Moon Lady at the August Moon festival?

I understand that its good to have a summer festival in Chinatown. And we should keep it, but why not celebrate the traditional holidays close to the actual dates? Chinese New Year is done this way… and so is the Dragon Boat festival.  Well…. moving on

Our Kung Fu School, Woo Ching White Crane performed midday at this festival because we had a wedding performance later that day. We also had a wedding performance the day before… but more on those later.

For the festival we were going to just throw something together, but Sifu suggested that since it has been a few years since we’ve done stilts or done a fighting form that we should do them this year. we insisted we didn’t have enough people, would be to tired, etc. but in the end saw that Sifu was right. (he is always right)

We can do this stuff, why not just do it.

I actully did choy chiang on stlits, but we did not parade aroundas we did in the old days, due to convenience, politics, and lacking the manpower to stop someone from trying to intentionally knock me off the stilts.

As it turns out, many of the Kwong Kow kids I tech were there. Suddenly their sometimes mean kung fu teacher was someone they wanted to wave to and even admit to knowing.

Next came Kung Fu. I heard our kids did great and I also saw our friend  Moi Sifu, perform looking more bad-ass than the last performance. Why? The stage was larger and the weather was cool, as opposed to an oppressive heat.

I heard from Grace, who was holding our child and taking pictures that My fighting form looked pretty good. I also heard that the Old ladies near Si Mo were gasping with fear that my blade was so close to cutting my partners head of each time.This was probably the smoothest performance of the form we have done yet.

I also enjoyed watching the audience (especially the old men) during My Si Hing’s Kwan Gung vs. Choy Yerng form. I could see at the part where he does the motions of putting the five beards back in place that the men would turn to each other saying “I told you so… I knew it was Kwan Gung” Th young people just see it as a cool big knife probably.

To end  Ika  Hsiao performed yo-yo. This time the gusts of wind mad it difficult to maintain spin, but Ika’s Performace hi time was stillbetter than last. She moved aroundthe stage more and added new tricks, jumping rope up to three times with the string while the yo-yo was in the air, and then catching it. I could hear the crowd cheering over my drumming. So we brought out many types of things this year for traditionalists, kids, and danger lovers.

Now for the weddings. I have to mention one first that might actually start a trend. The Bride and Groom requested that they do the lion dance as they come in as a surprise.  Then they would come out of the heads and we switchedwith them and that’s how they presented themselves. Never heard of it being done and it must have been pretty cool. Too bad I couldn’t see the audience’s face because I was in the tail.

This entry was posted on August 16, 2010 at 10:07 pm and is filed under AROUND C-TOWN. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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