Cohousing-L Mailing List: changeable fun

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

A good community builder is something people can participate in changing. 
Do you have some other examples we might try?


In our town there is a classical female statue in a fountain, which often 
gets dressed in costumes for holidays by mysterious pranksters, to 
everyone's pleasure. 
My sister's gang of friends have a pair of life-sized cloth "dummies" 
named Fred and Ginger who over the years have appeared in all sorts of 
outfits and situations: someone who got taken in for emergency surgery 
awoke to find Fred and Ginger in the next bed in the hospital room!

At RoseWind Cohousing we are having fun  this week with something 
ridiculously unsophisticated. 
Member A complained that member B's new culverts were a hazard.
B marked them with miscellaneous flags.
A complained the flags were "tacky."
B replaced the flags with two pairs of pink plastic flamingoes. 
A had a good laugh. 

But over the past month, the flamingo flock has grown to about a dozen 
and they keep appearing in different places, "doing" different things. 
One appeared with extra tall legs and a golden crown and cape.
It is silly, but there is a pleasant suspense to "What are they doing 
today?"

I had left this game to others, but last night I made my move. This 
morning I rigged each one up with a bouquet of May Day flowers to 
"deliver" and a printed poem, and set one, at dawn, at each front door. 
One gal then wrote us of her horror at discovering yesterday that the 
flock was gone, extinct! Visions of vandals or predators. When her 
husband told her this morning that he could show her what happened to 
them, she said she shuddered and braced herself for the sight of "pink 
body parts strewn everywhere...." only to find the pleasant 
flower-messenger bird. 

Another member (wife of original complainer A) got poetic:

 Ode to the Pinks

O Sacred Pinks with message bright,
Do not from RoseWind now take flight;
But stay with us throughout the year
In any corner you hold dear.

When first you came, we were surprised.
"A tacky lot", we were advised.
"They'll move on soon, not stand about.
Migration brings them on this route."

Then you began to circle round
In ritual rites upon our ground.
Your Queen broke ranks to ascertain
If RoseWind were a fair domain.

You checked us out in rain and wind;
You watched to see how much we sinned.
And lo your brilliant forms still stand
Like sentinels upon our land.

So stay with us and be our fowl.
And cause our neighbors all to howl
With laughter and with jealousy
To think that people such as we
With nothing in our heads but air
Have wooed and won the Feathered Fair.

---------------------
A popular local bumper sticker reads 
Port Townsend: "We're all here because we're not all there"
At RoseWind, we try to blend right in....




Lynn Nadeau, RoseWind Cohousing
Port Townsend Washington (Victorian seaport, music, art, nature)
http://www.olypen.com/sstowell/rosewind
http://www.ptguide.com

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