Today is May Day¹, a holiday which many celebrate by dancing around the maypole. I don’t have a maypole, but I may dance around the living room with Phoebe. Perhaps while listening to Safety Dance³.
As Painted Maypole pointed out last year, the video for Safety Dance features a maypole. (Also Morris Dancing. I probably won’t attempt to Morris dance with Phoebe.)
(You can see slightly better quality video at the MTV site here).
Painted Maypole, who has adopted May Day as her blog’s official holiday, offers a whole host of other May Day activities and photos of her own festivities.
She also entreated us to compose a May Day poem or song for this week’s Monday Mission. I struggled with this assignment, but
inspiration finally struck, and happily without causing serious injury.⁴ Here is my May Day tanka⁵:
-
the maypole beckons
revelers frolicking ’round
bright ribbons entwined
you can dance if you want to
you can leave your friends behind
¹ Today is also No Pants Day, an event I can’t really get behind with all of its dangerously anti-pants propaganda.²
² We can (wear) pants if we want to!
³ Safety Dance is one of Phoebe’s favorite songs, and will sometimes ask to hear it over and over again. She requested it at the wedding we went to in March, and cried when she learned we’d only get to hear it the one time.
⁴ I wasn’t sure where to fit this in, but I learned that May Day, as a distress call, is actually based on m’aider from the French phrase venez m’aider, meaning “come rescue my sorry ass.”
⁵ I was introduced to the Tanka form by girlgriot, who stunningly wrote a tanka a day for the entire month of April.
collecting tokens 
thank you, friend, for dancing around the maypole, and not leaving this friend behind. I adore you.
I danced my little heart out today at Jazz Fest. A beautiful May Day! The maypole still awaits this weekend.
S (s s s)
A (a a a)
F (f f f)
….
love that song! :) and I love that Pheobe loves it!
Ok, you might actually have just killed me! I laughed so hard watching that video. I have always loved the total wackiness of that song, but I had never seen the video!
How cool that you wrote a May Day tanka! I wrote a first of May tanka, too … and then went home and fell asleep and didn’t post it. Feh. How quickly the post-a-day can fall apart.
Thanks for starting my morning with a belly laugh!
I love that song! This scene from Scrubs always makes me laugh.
Love the video, but even more I love that found me the derivation of the May Day distress call. I was wondering that yesterday.
Some junior high gym teacher of Paul’s played “Safety Dance” as the warm up song every day… the scars are permanent. Now he can’t even hear the title without wincing.
Well it looks like you have all the bases covered there. When we took the children to England last year we watched Morris Dancers…….the children were completely bemused but liked the idea of cracking sticks together.
Cheers
I love that song.
I missed out on the Maypole business because for me this holiday is Bealltainn.
Now off to find out the rules for Tanka.
Total Ear Worm…but in a good way. :o)
ps I’ve cast you in a play over at my place