Where's the Dragon?

Hartford, CT

If you've ever been to a Chinese New Year's celebration, or just seen one on TV or in a movie, you will have been impressed by the wonderful optical/experiential illusion of The Dragon Dance. The flimsy, mostly paper, "dragon," wielded by a long line of people weaving and bobbing, can become utterly convincing. You see the dragon, not the people animating it.

Well, Hartford's Hooker Day Parade has its own version of this. If The Dragon Dance is a kind of exercise in perceptual minimalism, HDP has the reductio ad absurdam of that. Two groups danced the one mile parade route with 18-inch wide carpet runners, making all the moves. No dragon head. No lovely paper scales down the length of the serpent's body. Just a couple of ratty carpet remnants. Thing is, it still worked, kinda...

Cemetery Tour, II

Washington, CT

Cemetery Tour, I

Washington, Connecticut

We interrupt the Hooker Day Parade for some more current Halloween pictures. Friday evening the Gunn Memorial Museum in Washington, CT, held its third annual tour of the Washington Green Cemetery. Costumed guides led visitors on an hour-long tour, "where the town's departed citizens [are] stationed by their gravestones to tell their tales."

Good Friday Procession, II

Litchfield, CT

Good Friday Procession, I

Litchfield, CT

Procession

Stockbridge, Massachusetts

A special weekend at The Shrine of Divine Mercy.