VooDoo finale

Took me a while to get around to this, but here it is.

The final day of Voodoo. I came into the festival with the intention of getting good position for the Flaming Lips, as that was the only act I was truly excited for on the day. I managed to get a pretty good spot, which pleased me greatly. As the crowd waited patiently, Widespread Panic was finishing their set to an audience that couldn't care less. That band was truly pathetic. There was a more excited crowd watching the sound check for the Lips than in the front row of WSP. They had no chemistry or energy, and one could feel the prayers radiating from the crowd for them to GTFO.

Finally, the lights went down. A large, semicircular screen took up the middle of the stage. Suddenly, the screen lit up in psychedelic shades of orange and red, and the image of a girl dancing appeared. The figure danced around for a while, and then layed down as to put her feet toward the audience. The image then went spread eagle, exposing a small opening of pulsating psychedelic light in a predictable place on her anatomy. The screen progressively zoomed in as the rift grew more and more, until eventually the pulsing psychedelic crevasse was the only thing visible on the screen. Suddenly, the band member walked out of the radiating vagina one by one and took theiir places at their instruments.

Except Wayne Coyne.

He decided to appear already inside his inflatible gerbil ball, and immediately made his way into the crowd, to the pleasure of all. After a few minutes he returned to stage to open the show. As soon as the first song began, cannons shot off from both sides of the stage, showering the crowd in confetti. Almost immediately afterwards, upwards of fifty gigantic orange balloons were released, bouncing into the crowd. It was around this time Coyne began firing streamers out of a handheld gun-like contraption. The moon was full. The weather was perfect. The whole experience was magical. Once the show ended nobody moved. Even as Lenny Kravitz took to the opposite stage, the masses continued to look up in awe at the Lips' vacant equipment. Coyne returned to the stage and waved to the herd for quite some time before the crowd finally began to move away. A majority of the people simply made their way to the exit from there. Lenny Kravitz was not enough to keep us there, because there is simply no way he could top what we had all just collectively experienced. Even today I was still talking about it with other people who were there. It was a perfect end to a wicked festival.