Masquerade!!

So, this friday was my ward's "Fall Formal Masquerade Ball". The idea came up in a Services and Activities Committee meeting in September, and has kind of been the focus of our meetings ever since. So, now that it's done, I can blog about it in its entirety.

This was one of the few times that I saw Murphy's law at work. I can only say I've experienced it a couple other times, like the "i-had-the-flu-and-missed-the-bus-so-i-rode-my-bike-to-my-ochem-midterm-in-the-rain-after-having-no-food-and-water-and-then-i-pass-out-in-front-of-the-chem-building" incident. Anyway, we had to deal with quite a few last-minute problems, like the computer with the playlist on it getting a virus at 1 AM the night before, so Daniel and I stayed up til 5 making a new one. We didn't have too many people to help setting up, either. There were usually 3 of us there at any given time. Set-up would've been a lot easier and a lot faster if more people had just come for a few hours. I spent most of the day blowing up 220-something balloons. Here are some pictures of how it turned out.


It's hard to get people to come out to YSA activities here. For some reason, there's this stigma that "nobody goes to stuff here" and that "we should just cancel the dance and go hang out in _(insert other town here)_". I didn't really care too much, because in the worst case scenario, not too many people would show up and it would've been like we threw ourselves a really elaborate costume party! We have a lot of really negative people in our ward, and it really bothers me. For some reason, they enjoy hanging out with the people from our ward if it's a movie night or a bonfire, but if you move our hang-out to a church building and turn on some loud music, it's not fun anymore. And what we end up seeing is a self-fulfilling prophecy... if a bunch of people say stuff like "this is gonna suck, nobody's gonna come", they're not going to be excited about it, they're not going to promote it, and when less people come, they're gonna say "look, I was right". Gahhhhh.

That's not to say our dance was at all a failure. A good amount of people showed up from all over the place. I was pretty pleased with the turnout. Hopefully, the people who did go had a good time and will tell their friends to go to another activity that we have here, so we can start to change some of those rumors.


In other news, I had a lot of fun dressing up for the dance. Here are some other pictures of people in their costumes.