Dancing Rabbit!!

We’re going down to Missouri for the weekend, to visit our friends at Dancing Rabbit ecovillage. Huzzah! The girls were hoping for warm weather, so they could swim in the pond, but mid March is still too cold for that. I’m planning to take pictures, because I don’t think anyone we know has ever been there.

Shameless plug: Of course, if you have watched FX Network’s series “30 Days”, you may have seen Cecil, Tony, Tamar, and the rest of the Rabbits in the episode “Off the Grid”, when two dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers had to spend one month living at DR. The series is the brainchild of Morgan Spurlock (the guy who did the movie Supersize Me). The Rabbits have all sorts of stories about the filming (they say, like anyone who has been involved in reality TV, that some of it didn’t happen quite as it was portrayed in the final product). If you have the chance, give it a peek. What’s nice about Spurlock is that he includes facts and information about the topic at hand, so you do come away feeling like you’ve learned something.

But back to us and DR. The Consort and I were involved in the beginning of this project, back in California [I still remember a phone call when I first mentioned the idea of an ecovillage to my mother. She hung up on me (!), called one of my sisters, and cried, “We paid for college and she’s just going to drop it all to raise sheep!” (Let’s not get into the fact that college was all loans taken out in my name, and that the woman at times still has a hard time understanding that at 38 I am an adult and can make my own choices…but no, I’m not still sore about it)]. [I also remember going to eco-fairs and manning the Dancing Rabbit table. So often these blue-haired ladies would come up to us and in all seriousness say, "You shouldn't name it Dancing Rabbit, because rabbits do terrible terrible damage to your garden. No one would want to be a dancing rabbit!"]

But it was a lot of talk—for a loooong time—then I got pregnant, and we needed to make some decisions. The other members weren’t ready to make a decision, so we bought land in Vermont and moved more in the background of the project. The initial group decided to buy land in Missouri (“The midwest!” I shouted when I heard. “Who in their right minds would move to the midwest!” Two years later, where do we end up? You know the answer: The midwest.)

Anyway, we love going to visit, the Consort is on their Board of Directors, and let me tell you, if they were located in the woodsy Northeast, we wouldn’t be waiting around for Mr. Duck U. to yank us around any longer.

So go visit their site, have fun, and we’ll see you on Monday!