Glimpses Of The World As I See It

Guinness World Record Attempt

Earlier this month, students and Gainesville residents made a valiant effort to break a Guinness World Record for the world’s longest massage chain of people. Alas, even though they just missed the 430-mark, the huge crowd at University House - 13th Street apartments had a blast as they dodged raindrops. Participants got free t-shirts, free refreshments, free massages from Florida School of Massage employees, and prizes for correctly answering movie trivia questions. Gainesville Rock Gym was there too with a rock wall that participants could climb, and Kiss 105.3 was also at the event playing live music with DJ Brett Douglas. Here are some photos from the attempt:

A Costume Ball

Following the performance of Dracula! (previous post), there was a costume ball on stage, which was a lot of fun to shoot. See for yourself:

Dracula! (The Ballet)

A few days before the Ten Tenors performance, I attended Dracula! the ballet, a two-hour performance put on by the Dance Alive National Ballet. I had never seen Dracula before so I wasn't sure what to expect but since I'm not a huge vampire fan, I wasn't really expecting to enjoy it. I was wrong. The ballet was beautiful, and all the dancers were great and really drew me into the story line as they danced and leaped across the stage. They took me by surprise with how good they were, and in retrospect, I'm glad I got to be there.

The Ten Tenors

Early this month, I had the privilege of getting to see Australian singing sensation The Ten Tenors perform live here as part of their Nostalgica World Tour 2009. They were amazing. Here are some shots from the performance, and I also wrote a brief article about the event that can be found here: http://blog.insitemagazine.com/public_html/blog/2009/11/ten-tenors-at-phillips-center.html.

The Great Pumpkin Drop

At the end of last month, the day before Halloween, I got to cover a unique event: the first Great Pumpkin Drop, in which 14 people dressed in costume got to chuck pumpkins off the roof of the Hippodrome Theatre downtown. It was the first time anyone had even been allowed on the roof before, let alone throw pumpkins off of it, aiming at a giant painted target down below (pictured above). It was fun admiring the costumes and watching people throw the pumpkins off the roof, especially the woman dressed as Kate Goslin, the famous mom of 8 from the TLC show "Jon & Kate Plus 8", who wrote "Jon" on the side of her pumpkin in Sharpie before throwing it off the roof and shattering it to pieces.