The fake kind? We're only doing theater, and pardon me if I'm sounding like a prude, but this is not the "fornication station". While taking the performance that far would not be unprecedented, doing so would set a tone incompatible with what we're trying to do. The moment the grunting starts, the laughter ends.

We're not going to attempt extreme realism. Assuming that we even could find any virgins to be 'sacrificed', no small trick at a burn in any sense, any stage blood that the presumably very uninhibited actors would be wearing would end up on them for the remainder of their time out, given the weakness of sun showering. If you've ever worn the stuff, you know just how unpleasant it can get after a while. At a clothing optional burn, visitors will have been sufficiently desensitized to nudity toward the end of the event, when we'd be doing this, that the nudity of the victim at this staged sacrifice would have little impact, anyway. Holding the fake black mass near the beginning of a burn, on the other hand, would make the rest of what we did seem anticlimactic.

At a non-clothing optional event, like the small local events we're likely to be at, even if we could find somebody to play the victim, which is far from being a given, we could get shut down for the nudity, and it would tend to draw in the wrong, frat boy element, very contrary to the spirit that I hope has been coming through on this page. I wouldn't call it "fun for the whole family", but I would like to see burning take a slightly higher road to low comedy.

Some will be unhappy to read this, feeling that without a willingness to push that boundary, what we are left with is too tame for a burn. I disagree. By the time a burn is over, I think that people will understand what we're about, so I don't think that we'll be closing on a note of frustrated disappointment for the audience, though we obviously would be for the characters, because I don't think that anybody would drop by our place expecting to see a strip show. What they will be dropping by for is to see a lighthearted but strange spectacle, and laying chains over an adult novelty product while chanting the words to "Hava Nagilah" backwards, or whatever we end up doing, will be strange enough.

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