Eeyore and Birthday Suits

I had read about "Eeyore's Birthday" festival in many of the resources I utilized to learn about Austin gems and traditions. And what my innocent, naive, new-to-Austin self pictured was a bunch of kids running around in a field taking pictures with (somewhat shady) people in Winnie the Pooh costumes. I thought to myself, "What a great idea to throw a city-wide festival for the character that always felt forgotten... to throw a birthday party for the old grey donkey who thought nobody liked him."

After attending the festival last Saturday, I learned that I was right about a few things. There were kids running around. There were lots of pictures being taken. There were many costumes. And there were several shady people. On top of that, there was a good bit of nudity. Lots of painted ta-tas. One (er, 50) too many elderly individuals not wearing nearly enough clothing. And to my knowledge, there were only two people dressed as Winnie the Pooh characters.

Let's just say that Eeyore had the best birthday of his life. This year, everybody liked him. They liked him enough to wear their own birthday suit to his birthday party.

I really wasn't understanding the theme of this over the top festival. There were a lot of people dressed as fairies. And it appeared that the others, who weren't half nude with paint on their unspoken parts, had grabbed every eccentric piece of clothing or accessory out of their closet and found a home for it on their body. On top of the wild costumes or lack thereof, the festival had potato sack races, unicycle football, live bands, and clans of people in the woods just embracing their free spirit, I suppose. It was.... insane. I typed "weird" and erased it, and then "interesting" and erased it. Those words just aren't strong enough. It was insane.

And yes, I creepily took a picture of the man in the blue G-string. And yes, I had to take a dangerously close look at his pimpled, scratched up rear end on Paint while trying to censor this blog post and keep it from teetering on the edge of PG-13. That's how much I love all of you.