FL @ RR

As someone who can have trouble expressing excitement beyond 'bemused,' watching Lindsey squeal with glee each of the half-dozen+ times we passed within sight of Ship Rock and Creation Rock - aka: Red Rocks - was a treat. Lindsey's pictures of the rocks are both beautiful and little testaments to the sheer will power it seemed to take for her to sit still long enough to shoot them.
They are astounding, especially when seen from a distance. They rip through a tan rolling valley, adding some alarming red to an otherwise prosaic scene.
It was just below those audacious rocks in the parking lot that Lindsey and I got our first impressions of how the night would go.
Flaming Lips fans mean business.
We saw three bananas drinking beer. We saw panda bears, rabbits, fairies, lopsided asymmetrical mohawks and flower-adorned symmetrical mohawks. We saw what could only be described as a space cowboy.
This was going to be awesome.
The Concert(!!!)
The closest thing to justice I can do to the concert is to report that the experience made this cynic think in terms of 'love,' 'peace,' 'purify,' 'psychic energy,' etc. for a good 24 hours (but we were smart enough not to attempt any writing in this period, weren't we?).
All I can say is: Go to a Flaming Lips concert. Just do it. Bring an old Halloween costume and a laser pointer and just go. It is a happy and purifying (hey!) experience.
Basically it was Wayne Coyne playing with the audience and the audience playing right back.
I believe I spent the first half hour with a stupid grin on my face -- stone cold sober, mind you -- not really able to comprehend what was going on. I must have blown a fuse or something because I have now are fragmented memories.
I remember the band appearing and waving from a womb-door and Coyne out of a giant hamster ball. I remember 1-2 dozen person-sized inflatable balls bouncing around the audience. I remember boy-sheep and girl-cows hopping and dancing, respectively, on either side of the stage. I remember Coyne riding around piggyback on a gorilla for a song. I remember more confetti than I'd ever seen in a month come out of the stage in under two minutes. I remember the audience throwing hundreds of glo-sticks at Coyne in a failed attempt at "psychedelic plastic rain."
I remember Coyne asking us to hold up the peace sign as hard as we could and Lindsey and I holding up two fingers each as hard as we could. I remember looking out at the lights of Denver laid out behind the stage and honestly wondering for a second if we had woken the city (about 10 miles away) up.
So, in short, we had fun.