Shark turds and flaming torches.

The most recent local festival to raise money for cancer had a bunch of kids activities attached to it as well. There was a children's entertainer who was frankly mediocre. There is a lot of work for these guys, every villages seems to have about 100 festivals every year, as far as I can tell. That isn't fair, but they have a solid 50 and there are children's entertainers booked for most of them, sometimes more than one. This leads to a lot of folks doing this, however it doesn't seem to improve the quality. This guy was reasonably talented, he had some neat tricks, but very little crowd presence or timing. He looked like he needed to go through the crucible of some serious street busking where you have to work your *ss off to keep the crowd there and entertained. The kids were more interesting to watch than he was, they were drawn moth-like to the large open dance area in front of the stage and there was good music playing as a backing for the show. Some of those little kids had MOVES. They also were not watching the entertainer over much.

Now this is Spain here, so when he decided to juggle flaming torches immediately above the children's heads, none of the parents moved to get the sweet dumplings back from the stage...these kids run the correfoc for goodness sakes, and he was reduced to hopping down from the stage and scattering the children by running around amongst them with flaming torches in his hands. They backed up briefly, and then when he returned to the stage they all came back, albeit slightly more loosely gathered. One woman got her 14 month old. Fortunately nothing dire happened. That would make me sweat though. Can you imagine how he felt? A mediocre juggler tossing around flaming torches above the bobbing heads of 50 children under 6?

Then there was the bouncy shark-turd toy. Yup. This was one of those bouncy castles, shaped like a shark. The kids run up it's mouth which closes after them, and they fling themselves down it's gullet emerging from it's backside...weird eh? It would have been fun if they had emerged bagged in brown paper....

Shark bait....to shark turd all in one easy step.