One Night Of Fire

One Night of Fire is a yearly party held in NYC. And this year, i was lucky enough to have taken part in it.
The premise is this: thousands of people gather on the Brooklyn bridge, then slowly but surely make their way to a beach party in Coney Island.
Along the way we stopped by the entrance to city hall, its fountain, and then made our way to the subway. Every step of the way there was a huge party: music, dancing, cheering, stilt walkers, people in costumes, people singing, subway crowd surfing, drinking, etc. The look on the subway rider's faces when they saw hat their train was invaded was absolutely priceless. Once we arrived to Coney Island, the party streamed out of the trains and onto the beach, dancing and playing music along the way. On the beach itself there was a large fire show - fire dancers, fire hula hoop people, fire jugglers, you name it - if it had fire it was there. Afterwards people started setting off fireworks of their own. Even the cops got into the fun with a police boat launching 3 flairs into the night sky.
And then there was the always mandatory nude swimming. There were some unlucky nude swimmers that were lead out of the water by the police with the lights shining bright on them. Hmm, its probably on youtube:-).
So after the swimming we hit up two after parties - a nearby bar where the stilt dancer girls refused to take off the stilts, and a dude's loft in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn. Lots of amazing music, amazing people and amazing times. Truly, i have found what i was looking for - something real under the macho NYC facade. Lets just hope there are more gatherings like this in the future.

Came back home at 5:30 am, just as the sun was rising.


Some afterthoughts: the setting, the mood, the execution was all perfect.It was one of those rare deep spiritual moments when a person can experience true freedom (or at least i did). And all it took was a couple of thousand people:-). But on the flip side, i noticed something interesting - the ratio of men to women was really bad, there weren't that many pretty girls at this thing at all, so this scene doesn't really look to be the ideal situation to meet people (well, people to fuck and date). I talked to one girl, first i thought she was foreign, then i realized she was just strung out or tired. So that night only serves to back up my original theory - that hot girls tend to congregate towards the "trendy" and don't really like to step outside the "norm", even though most of the people there seemed to be cool and well balanced individuals. And most girls that are in some type of "alternative lifestyle" (god i hate using that buzzword), were probably brought in by a significant other.

So i guess, right now its back to match.com and clubs