Ice Fest

This weekend is our town's annual Ice Fest.

They usually put out the one-block, pre-carved sculptures on Thursday and start carving the "giant sculptures" in place, then have the ribbon cutting ceremony that evening, but since it was raining that got pushed back to yesterday.

I'm sure that keeping them out of the rain helped somewhat, but they would have been even better off if the weather weren't in the upper 40s during the day, and not quite down to freezing at night.

It certainly didn't slow down the crowds, though. Drippy, abstract ice sculptures aside, it seems that people are alot more interested in wandering around downtown in 40ish weather than 20ish.

Other than having to squint and guess what some of them were, it was actually quite pleasant, and Peeper really got a kick out of the "ice statues."

This is one of the big attractions: The Giant Chair. I never hear anyone refer to it as a "throne," it's always "The Giant Chair." Every kid in town has an annual photo sitting in The Giant Chair. We had to wait in line for a while, and I even saw teenagers getting up there.

The handles of this vase were just about to go.

A nurse, sponsored by a local health center.

Every kid in town has this annual photo, too.

Another big chair, but not The Giant Chair.

This is one of the "giant" sculptures. How big?

This big!

At first, I thought this was a seahorse. . .

. . . but since it's sponsored by a Chinese restaurant, I'm assuming it's a dragon, as in "the year of."

One of my personal favorites - a giant taco, from the Mexican restaurant that we go to.

In addition to the sculptures themselves, today was the chili cook-off, the cake decorating contest, and - our primary destination - the ballet.

Peeper and I spent about an hour looking at the ice and then headed over to the theater. Technically, the performance included three separate ballets, two short ones and a longer.

The first was "Winter Scene" which was basically ballet dancers pretending to ice skate, but it was much more entertaining than that makes it sound.

The second was called "Mozartiana" and was just three dances, and then the main feature was "The Firebird" which was performed under black light.

It was very cool, and I really wish I could show photos of it, but of course, that's not allowed.

During the first half, Peeper was totally alert, watching every step, clapping when appropriate and clapping along with the music at other times.

During The Firebird, she was started to get sleepy, and nursed for a while in the middle. She might have also been a little bit scared, because it was during the bit battle scene, which is the Firebird and Prince versus the main bad guy, who is a "grotesque bird-like creature" (with a weird bird mask and giant hands) and his "Infernals" which are wolves and skeletons. And scary music. And glowing, black-lighty things.

I asked her later, though, and she said it wasn't scary, and told me that she liked that part, so maybe she was just tired.

Afterward, when I asked what her favorite part was, she said that it was "the snowflakes," which it turns out means the Snow Fairies, who are the very first dancers in Winter Scene. Because "Dey had cwowns!"

She's a sucker for a tiara.

Afterward, I offered to take her out to eat, but she just wanted to come home. When we got here, she stripped down to her panties (of course) and started reenacting the ballet. She was Pwince Iv-wan (Ivan) and her ballerina doll/ornament was the Firebird.

Maybe I should have ponied up the $25 for the DVD of the performance.