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Today I was looking for my favourite Need poster. I found this great story by Rachel from the Need. It fills me with hope, wonder, a measure of self-doubt and also much joy. Maybe you'll like it too:

But rather than go off about Olympia's amazing sense of community and so on, I'm going to tell you a story...so one summer night a bunch of pale-faced dyed-black punker-dykes were hanging out when a gang of lumberjack dykes (that's what we called them) crashed the party and tried to start a rumble. They got away with a trophy and a handful of underwear. Thus began the Olympia Dyke Gang Wars - The Sleazy Fuckers vs. The Scrawny Wusses. You can guess who was who.

There was a midnight face-off in the empty lot behind Gold's Gym. We chased each other with crowbars around the parking lot of the adult video store. A hideous painting of a girl fucking an octopus kept turning up on porches all over town. One night the Sleazy Fuckers took a hostage (she was already in her pajamas) and returned her late that night with a series of polaroids of herself tied up and blindfolded in a dog kennel. P.S. she really liked it...anyway we finally declared a flag code - white on the right if you were open to ambush, white on the left if you weren't. We started hanging out in the Safeway parking lot on thursday nights, car doors thrown open, stereos blasting, the dudes in hesher drag - bandanas, mesh, moustaches, camaro mullets - and the dolls in anklets and heels and halter-tops. We arm-wrestled. We strutted around and played air guitar. We drank coke in a can. It was beautiful.

But eventually we got bored of play-fighting and started talking...now the Sleazy Fuckers were more on the activist trip, and the Scrawny Wusses played in bands and went to art school. We all wanted to do something huge - and what came of our collision/collusion was The Transfused. An original rock opera that took a year to write and another six months of full production - besides working and re-working the music and lyrics and plot, there were auditions, rehearsals, benefits, planning meetings...and we raised almost $40, 000 without corporate sponsorship. Olympia was transformed. Kids moved here to work on it. Everyone got involved somehow - fundraising, sets, props, costumes. The closing show culminated in a parade that took over downtown Olympia. It was indescribable, really. The Transfused couldn't have come together the way it did in anyhere else...Mount Olympus! Whose gods and demi-gods play out the ultimate fictions. Small towns have a protoplasmic quality you can actually feel - it's like functioning at the cellular level. Germination, infection, chromosomal deviation...but the downside of small town living is that it's real easy (apparently) to get comfortable. To settle. I think Olympia's self-made mystique is, at heart, a product of its culture of boredom. It's enough to make you crazy.

Oh please can we all stop with this crazy real life crap, move to the same spot and stage a rock opera? Or make Sandy's queer cowboy movie?