Eeyore's Birthday

April 24th, or the Last Saturday in April, was the day of this year's, and the 47th overall, Eeyore's Birthday Party Celebration out at Pease Park.

I remember at some point in the past the first time Rachel mentioned "Eeyore's Birthday", some kind of hippie festival, and I stopped her and wanted clarification: Eeyore? Like from Winnie the Pooh? The answer was emphatically yes, and, do you know any other Eeyores?

I did some research: a group of UT students back in 1963 got together to have a Saturday celebration, named it Eeyore's Birthday after a specific story from the Winnie the Pooh world where Eeyore thinks everybody's forgotten his birthday only to find there's a surprise party in his honor. By 1974 it had been moved from its original park to Pease Park (one of the more beautiful and difficult disc golf courses in town) and had been basically taken over by the dirty hippie elements that "keep Austin weird".

Many of the original elements exist: around-the-maypole activities; sack races for kids and still-sober adults; face and breast painting...Newer elements take the form of drum circles and, I'd assume, the vast bartering of certain items for other items, probably mostly all of them ingestible.

The event is free, and there are t-shirt and beer sales, with all proceeds going to charity. The event is organized by "Friends of the Forest", a non-profit conservationist society. If you know people who are Friends, they'll expect you to volunteer for the beer tent for a few hour shift--in exchange for free beer afterwards--and recruit as many friends of yours as possible to also volunteer. If anybody out there who reads this knows Corrie's cousin Rachel, then you're probably not surprised to hear that she knows a Friend, has volunteered every year for the past seven, and has brought many of her friends under the tent in that time. Tony arrived the Friday before, and even he worked. I would have, but had to go to the paying job instead.

Corrie worked, and took the pictures that will follow. She and Rachel decided to wear something special for the party, and eventually Corrie's "fairy wings" came to envelop a feathered halo contraption that, while wild and feathery, was successful as an attraction in and of itself; I hear she was photographed many times by many folks.

Volunteers get a version of the t-shirt that gets sold, but with a different color shirt, so other volunteers know not to charge them for beer. This year the for-sale shirt had this year's design on a black t-shirt, while the volunteers had the design on a blue shirt. Simple enough. The designs the last few years have been, uh, interpretive at best...rather cool I've thought, or strange or post-modern in an impressionist kind of way. This has been because of lawsuits from the Disney Corporation for improper license infringement, since the image that was invariably used was the Eeyore from the animated features.

Before I get to the pictures: the name "Eeyore" is a representation of the onomatopoeic braying "hee-haw" sound a donkey makes, but utilizes two Cockney accent contrivances--the common "h-dropping", and the "silent r" phenomena.

Here are the pictures that either Corrie or Rachel or somebody else took, as I saw none of this first hand.

The first is an announcement of when it closes, and probably one of the pictures that would anger a Disney lawyer.



Here is a picture of a hippie-inspired banner. I'm sure the chronically depressed stuffed donkey would be heartened to see it.



Here are some confident ladies getting their breasts painted, soon to be among the rather large group of ladies walking around with pigments rather than clothes on their upper-halves.



Here's Corrie in her feather-halo-with-wings working a keg.



Here's a group of ladies, including Corrie, Rachel, and Steph (our roommate) among the other women.