Danger and Fun

My friend W took me to the "Fiesta del Toro" in San Sebastian on Sunday-- much like neighborhood festivals back home, only with the Virgin Mary and a wooden bull figuring prominently. Oh, and little wieners.

It had rained cats and dogs earlier in the evening, but that did nothing to dampen the turnout. It could have been the ice cream or the ferris wheel, but I suspect it actually had something to do with the deep-fried Vienna sausages.

Hey, they're more fun than you might imagine: each wiener is cut length-wise about 3/4 of the way so that the deep fryer can work its magic, curling back each mini-panel of the sausage... well, before long, you've got your very own plate of delicate, pseudo-meaty flowerettes. They go great with fries.

But back to the Virgin Mary. There's not much to say, actually. She was there in the church, surrounded by the draped material that typically connotes a religious celebration. Folks drifted in and out to pray and pay their respects-- this, by the way, often involves a modestly-dressed grandmother acompanied by her middrift-baring grandaughters, who reverently take cell-phone pictures, right close up, of the Virgin in her resplendentness. (I, meanwhile, worry about somehow appearing disrespectful just because I'm the only foreigner in the room. Different rules apply, of this I am sure.)

So you've got a mental picture now, right? Church in the center, food stands outside, along with carnival games, tables selling pirated DVDs, and a few carnival rides. And lots of electrical cables on the ground. I paid them no mind, but W, himself a Yucateco, found them worrisome given all of the standing water.

Knowing what we had come for, we carefully made our way to the baseball field and staked out our seats on the bleachers, which quickly filled up. W had told me about the locally famous "fuegos articifiales" (fireworks) that included a fiery "corrida de toro." Hmm... M-80's, cherry bombs *and* frightened livestock, combined! Now this I wanted to see, verily.

It started off calmly enough, with as many people wandering around in on the baseball field as everywhere else-- no crowd control, no Jersey barriers... and alas, no bulls that I could see.

But before long, I came to understand why we were here-- a man started setting off fistfulls of M-80s that whizzed across and over the field, through the meandering crowd and sometimes into the bleachers, sending everyone running, squeeling and screaming with a kind of unfettered glee that you just don't see in the US. I can assure you that no one was thinking about how this could put an eye out, and they certainly weren't thinking about liability. They were just trying to get as close to the action as possible without actually getting maimed.

Which brings us back to the corrida. Once the M-80 man had gotten things properly stirred up, a bull emerged on the scene. Constructed from wood and set on two rear wheels, this bull was freakishly adorned with every type of firework you can imagine. Wasting no time on drum rolls or safety measures, they lit the main fuse, at which point two brave souls took that bull by the horns, and ran it all over the field-- and, yes, straight into the crowd-- explosives flying out at every angle. We of the bleachers got our share of flaming firework detritus, but you know what? We had a great time.

The corrida was repeated three times, each time with the same bull. Between rounds, the M-80 man took shots at the crowd, and by the end of the third round, people were pretty whipped up. A couple of fights broke out on the field, but that didn't keep us from visiting the (now thorougly spent) bull after the show.

Days later, I'm still thinking about the roles of risk and danger in the construction of fun. Maybe it comes down to the extent to which that danger is real vs. perceived... maybe it comes down to available resources: after all, allowing opportunities for real danger is much cheaper than creating illusions of perceived danger. Or maybe it's not so much about money; the chaotic corrida produced moments of real lights-in-the-sky marvelousness, made all the more beautiful by the foil of fear. One depends on the other.

Anyway, if you've got any thoughts on the fun-dangerous moments in your life, or about carnival food that would qualify as disgusting in any other context, feel free to share and opine.