What did I do this weekend? Well, I whipped it out of course... my iaito that is. Why what did you think I was talkin' about? Perv.

New York Budokai, my iaido dojo, was invited to perform a demonstration at the Asian American Heritage Festival out in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. It had been a while since our group had even participated in a demo and as an intermediate member, this one would be my first. I have never been a performer and I could say I was a little nervous, but when I got out there I felt relatively calm (of course, it probably helped that I wasn't wearing my glasses and couldn't see a damn thing). That's not to say I didn't screw up a little bit. I took a wrong step in one of my forms and I missed a block doing irohauchi.

"Really? Irohauchi? You don't say..." Irohauchi is a partner form where you basically beat on each other with a pair of sticks called bokken. The form is choreographed and ideally, you and your partner are so syncopated that you don't lay a finger on each other. I lost my rhythm, as ADD people often do, and Deborah Sensei caught me on the arm. Thankfully, she was holding back.

Outside of that I did pretty well and, hey... I had fun.

UPDATE: Beth did such a wonderful job taking pictures and videos from the demonstration that decided to post them on their own site. Check them out here.