BBB Chapter 15: The rainbow bridge

After returning from those lion dances we got a message via Eagle from the Monk who had sold us the pink heads. There was a mother lion dance at the end of a rainbow bridge that he could help lead us to if we could muster the people. We checked which among our team was free that day because it was during the work week and sure enough, we had enough for a team. We gathered at the bamboo bridge where we did see a rainbow and with the help of the monk we were able to tread across to a golden palace. 

We brought two heads. The monk would drum, our students would do one head, and I did the other head with our neighbor and friend whom I had taught lion dance too while waiting for the bus.I will have to go back and tell you about that yet another time... 

The Golden palace was in change of a big chunk of the money that passed through New Jersey. It only dealt with the gold elves that had kingdoms of their own, and large kingdoms at that. 

There was a tiny town that remi6me if Chinatown inside the Palace, there was an arcade for people.to play the ancient games of the 1980's and several stores that sold hipster foods. We lion danced bowing at each store as if they had put out Chiangs...mainly to give our students the feeling of going store to store because New Jersey was not set up for that and we thought that one day... we may have to do that. After our parade around, the heads stopped and we performed Kung Fu.

Here I had my kids perform a three man fighting form that I had trained them to do for our Plum Village's Chinese New Year performance. We finished up, took our way back home crossing the rainbow and the bamboo bridge and continued onto another lion dance that Joyce had set up. 

After this one we stopped to eat at a Malaysian restaurant where we ordered a lavish meal. Thr6restaurant was quite empty because it was a week night. We had called ahead and had Pai Teep to another branch of the restaurant.... and even though this crowd was not super enthusiastic at first about our doing lion dance, they had also given us permission to do it. 

When we started suddenly mist of the staff did get pretty excited about it, pulling out phones and an elderly woman giving tye5head extra Hong baos. We did several rounds which the chefs interpreted as a second collection which cause them to stare straight into their rice bowls and homemade Chinese food that they had cooked for themselves. A lot of bitter melon and cooling foods to counter act the yeet hei of working in a kitchen all day.

The truth is that the first round was our newer students, and then Joyce did a second round because we knew that being recorded, we had to show that we had the Gung Lik and skilled experience of a seasoned team even if some of our members were new. Thi king back.... I realize that actually this dance had happened ed before our store to store...two days before to be exact.and that there was one more additional dance before the store to store I had forgotten to mention as well as Plum Mountain's Chinese New Year award show... whichwas the most stressful of them all.

But more important to the story would be the next to lion dances led by the monk where he would assemble a super team of lion dancers and where the truth adventures would begin.