Canada Day Face Painting - Dawson City, Yukon Territory
When we finished the Dempster and returned back to Dawson, we got ourselves cleaned up and went to the city office to see if they had any need for volunteers over the next few days. We did this on the 27th of June with Canada day approaching on the 1st of July. Paul and Melissa were the city tourism contacts who we spoke to. At first they said there was no need for volunteers but after a little thought they realized that the Yukon River Quest needed some shift fill ins for the late night arrivals and they asked if we could facepaint for Canada Day-which I absolutely could! So we signed up for that and Melissa said the city would buy me some paint if I found any around town. We now have committed to 6 days in Dawson. We found some paints and some glitter stencils so Jordan could help out as well. We easily killed 5 days in Dawson hiking, fishing, climbing, and volunteering with the Yukon River Quest. Canada day approached quickly and it was time to facepaint the town. After the parade and speeches, we touched base with our city workers; Paul and Melissa. They were super busy but gave us our paints and glitter stencils for the face painting table-which ended up being where the balloon animal lady was stationed as well. We just took over the other half in the shade as it was like 90* this particular day. Then we basically blacked out, somehow painted and glitterized over 80 humans.
I went through the insane effort to set up a ‘menu’ of face painting choices for the kids. Simple things like maple leaves, tiger faces and bumblebees. The first kid who sat down said, ‘can I have a butterfly?’ - not on the menu kid, but fine. Next kid was like, ‘I want a moose.’ Ok that’s definitely not on the list of provided choices that were printed in black and white in the visitors center office at 9am this morning. I painted everything from moose, to tigers, to unicorns, to dinosaurs. One kid was like I want my face to look like the joker. Sorry kid that’s terrifying I’ll give you a white circle with a red smiley face inside, he was not impressed. Last but not least my favorite was this indecisive little girl who was holding up the line because her as her mother put it, ‘She can get whatever she wants, it’s her day.’ Okay, she’s 4, she doesn’t know what she wants and these kids waiting are impatiently getting into my paints. Finally after me trying to get an answer out of this child, she asks me to paint her ears blue. I looked at the mom for approval, ‘it’s her day’, blue ears it was, and that was a first. Meanwhile Jordan is reusing the glitter stencils on several people; ‘use this once only for sanitary purposes’. Meh, it’s Canada day and this is free. He used them until the moose no longer looked like a moose. We closed shop an hour over when we were supposed to, as they were starting to set up for the town’s annual cricket championship. We returned the paints to Paul and Melissa who kindly gave us several free drink tickets to Diamond Tooth Gerties. We used the tickets happily after a long 3 hours of black out face painting fun.
Get out and Vounteer!
