During our pre-festival work weekend for Mabon 2010, we elected Justin Anderle our new President of Mountain Mysteries Manifestations, llc. After election, he jokingly asked if he would get secret service agents along with his title. Which is what set this whole escapade in motion... For many, many years, Justin has served our Pagan community as part of our Safety team and has headed up the safety team for the past MMM festivals. He often spends the majority of the festival awake and on duty and we owe him a huge debt of gratitude for all he has given - so, of course, we have to mess with him...
The set-up:
Being his first festival as a safety team member, Courtney was
dubbed as our "secret service agent" and as we all know, occasionally the
secret service need to take the President down for his own safety.
Throughout Thursday and Friday, there were several discussions on how this
could possibly be done. At some point there was mention of yelling,
"gun", but our dear Scarlet pointed out that Justin would then know what was
coming, so we needed to yell something unexpected like, "teddy bear".
As it happened, Deb's daughter, Serena had her stuffed Kangaroos with her at
the festival. The smaller Kangaroo has a history of attacking, so it
was the natural choice. Many hours went by as we plotted and planned
and waited for the exact right moment to fulfill our mission.
The take down:
Late Saturday afternoon, we got our chance. Many people were attending
workshops and a handful of us were just hanging out in the tree frog lounge,
relaxing and chatting. That's when Deb. started doing what she does -
taking pictures - nothing odd here. What Justin didn't see was Deb.
handing over the dangerous kangaroo to one of our vendors, Jessa. As
Deb was taking pictures of the tree frog lounge, Courtney innocently
suggested a picture of the safety team together. If you look closely,
that's Jessa on the right side in the back ground, approaching.
Being the excellent secret service agent that he is, Courtney saw the danger and moments later there was the loud shout of "Stuffie!" as he flew into action to protect our president:
*note the fact that Courtney is throwing himself to the ground first so as
to avoid any injury to our president.
*This picture is worthy of a close-up as we see Courtney scanning the area
for other possible dangers (or is he looking to make sure he has an escape
route in case Justin wants to strangle him?)
The entire exercise took less than 15 seconds! The laughter, however
has lasted many, many, many months and continues to cause giggles to happen
in the oddest of places :)
**NOTE** PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO REPEAT THIS!!! JUSTIN AND COURTNEY HAVE SPENT COUNTLESS HOURS TOGETHER SO THERE IS (WAS) A TRUST LEVEL THAT ALLOWED THIS TO HAPPEN WITHOUT INJURY TO EITHER PARTY.
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