The Living Flag in Victoria 2013

I've mentioned that they didn't tell us, but if the RCMP had announced the foiled terror plot for Victoria in advance, my first choice of activities on Canada Day would not have been to gather with 3000 people in one tight spot on the Legislature lawn. Talk about making it easy for the terrorists. However since we didn't know, we decided to join our fellow Canadians at the parliament buildings on Canada Day to form a Living Flag.

They make it pretty simple, supplying participants who were willing to wait in a really long line with free red or white t-shirts (we brought our own) and mini Canada flags for us to wave. Of course you can't give Canadian kids sticks and not expect things to get a little combative...

...Yeah...those darn kids....

At the appointed time they had everybody file in to a pre-marked area on the Legislature lawn according to what color you were wearing. This is the part I was kind of dreading as it was crazy hot out and I thought being packed in tight with a bunch of other people was going to be unbearable. Turns out, you don't have to pack in all that tight at all. In fact you probably had more personal space in the flag than you did standing in line to be let in.

One by one the firetruck ladder took up photographers who wanted to take pictures of the event. Looking around I couldn't believe that there wasn't going to be large stretches of green in the middle of our flag, but we did our part and waved our flags frantically every time a new photographer went up...

...and sure enough when the pictures were published the next day, the flag actually looked pretty good.

Photo via Victoria Times Colonist

It got me thinking though. Each person in the flag has a reasonably large influence on the overall look of the picture. With our family of five people, we probably could have played havoc with the picture by just moving our location a little bit. I would have loved to see the photographers face if he went up in the bucket and instead of the maple leaf he saw this:

Written by Steve Pratt