The heat, the pow-wow and a good weekend!

The 2012 PBP Pow-Wow has come and gone. As usual, it was a scorcher. I didn’t dance or sing or volunteer for anything, but I came home tired every night. I should have just camped and I could have rested there during the day or hung around there during the slow times.  Oh, well maybe next year. The pow-wow was well-attended and some said we had 427 dancers, a bunch for sure and a new record.  Rest assured when you offer $100,000 in prize money, they will come. The whole pow-wow was an organized event, but the specials can take up oodles of time which can cause things to go late into the night.  Also when you offer that much cash, people don't come to see you, or your grounds or really give a damn on how it's run, it's all about the cash. That too is the name of the game these days!

We sat behind the bleachers under some small trees, and it was good shade but it wasn’t good for watching the dancers.  It was good for watching aspiring politicians work the crowd.  We are having an election this July and the campaign is on and the pow-wow was the time to catch voter attention. Some said what they hope to do, others didn’t say, evidently confident in the final outcome.  Some gave gifts away and they weren’t incumbents.  And the candidates did many acts of kindness throughout the weekend.  It’s too bad that can’t last for four years.

Our seating, although not in the front row, also gave us a chance to visit people as they went by.  I must have looked hungry because my niece Soga brought me a plate of catfish - top of the line cooking and Larry Cole, the man from Texas brought me 12 Cd's of all kind of music. They made my day!

At the end, an elderly lady started to tear down her vendor tent.  We were right there and she was working away and at first we thought somebody was going to help her, but that never happened so we got up and did our good deed for the week.  My brother, me, my wife and my sister helped her.  It was a struggle at times but it got done. Many young people just watched us without offering a hand, that was troubling, but it was more troubling that a candidate didn’t run across the arena to lend a hand.  Geez, I hope that isn’t an indictment on the work we will see out of them for the next four years. Flip Wilson used to say “what you see is what you get.”  Sometimes politics is like that!

I hang around the pow-wow to watch my grandson, Pat ko shuk, dance.  The boy loves to dance.  He doesn't win, he is disappointed, but just moves on to the next pow-wow and dances again.  He's a winner in my heart though.