We arrived in Park City Utah for the most fancy film festival in America. Then we invented a game. It's called "Dream Catcher Catching." Here is how to play. Walk around town and look in the windows. If you spot a dream catcher, that’s a point for you. If you are good, you should reach double figures in one block.
A dream catcher is made by weaving a web of material on a wooden hoop and hanging some special things like feathers and beads on it. They originated with the Ojibwa Nation, who hung them over kids beds to guard against nightmares. Dream-catchers were adopted and popularized as a symbol of the Pan-Indian movement in the 60's and 70's. Then they were snatched up by New Age culture, where they were elevated to the status of window dressing in expensive condos, like the ones here in Park City. Today, most of the dream catchers are out of action, away from beds, hanging in places where people don't tend to do anything but daydream. I saw one hanging over the kitchen sink where we are staying, waiting eternally for a narcoleptic dish-washer to pass out so that it could once again be put to use.
But narcolepsy aside, lets not forget the 500 pound gorilla in the room: "Sundance" itself. What is it really? The Sun Dance is a ritual practiced by several Native American nations. In some versions, young men dangle from the ceiling by bloody piercings in their chests. In the nineteenth century, White Man was so impressed with the danglers that he named a small town in Northwestern Wyoming "Sundance." Then, in 1887, the town imprisoned a horse thief who was thereafter dubbed "The Sundance Kid." Fast forward to 1969: Robert Redford played "The Kid" in a popular movie, and the same year bought land in Utah to build a ski area that he dubbed "Sundance." But the full transformation of the indigenous ritual into a brand came with Redford's founding of the Sundance Film Festival a decade later, which desperate film makers like us flock to every year, hoping upon hope that a distributor will buy our movie and keep us from being thrown in debtor's prison. Today at Sundance, if we want to join the party on Main Street, there is always someone at the door, checking their list and refusing us entry. We just aren't worthy. Next time when we want our Sundance we will stay home, pierce our manboobs, and hang from the rafters.
