By Maria Shaplin
This weekend, Applied Mechanics descended upon a gorgeous mansion in Mt Airy for our annual Jamboree. You might be familiar with Girl Scout, or even World Scout Jamborees- national and international gatherings of scouting organizations. But did you know that the word jamboree is a turn of the century American phrase, meaning “a rowdy, boisterous gathering”? The only member to truly, 100% personify that raucous spirit this year was our newest Mechanician Vern, who has just learned to crawl and climb up to a standing position. He is the life of the party. His gooey smiles and adoring coos were a blithesome backdrop to the business at hand. And LOTS of business it was. Just for funsies, lets also explore the origin of the word business. “Bisignis” was an Old English word 
meaning anxiety, care, and occupation, or the state of being busy. Modern definitions include terms like “profession, trade, commerce, patronage, profit, and enterprise”. It’s no secret to the folks who know us that Applied Mechanics has a complex relationship with “business” in all the abstract and concrete ways you could imagine. Ya know…. and then there’s capital, capitalism, patriarchy, systemic oppression, America the Beautiful, politics… We’ve got bones to pick with all those bad boys. We are trying to make art that critiques it, while existing within it. We need to make money, and we believe that money is inherently problematic in an exploitative capitalist system. Its tough to earn money in exchange for your art, and its tough to get money from granting organizations. The current funding climate in Philadelphia is a bit tumultuous. 
We have to both raise the sails and batten down the hatches to get through it. We have so much love, and so much art to give. We also have so much anger, and a commitment to resistance. Its takes a great deal of creative thinking to marry all of these conflicting threads that make up the tapestry of our work. Our annual Jamboree is one of the times we set aside to address all these things as a company, and its hard. We also task ourselves with the much more fun job of planning our upcoming season, and brainstorming and creating content for our shows and parties. This year we did some research into LARPing, which we have been lightly dipping our toes into for quite some time with our theme parties. Its probable that we will be continuing to explore this form, and providing our audience with a LARP experiment in 2017. So that’s REALLY EXCITING. On a final note, lots of our company members are pretty obsessed with a few recent movies, which I shall endorse here: Ghostbusters (2016), Magic Mike XXL (2015), and Fury Road (2015). Imperator Furiosa is such a damn hero… and now Becky 
looks exactly like her!!! Girlfriend just got the best haircut in the entire world. So in sum, this year’s Jamboree was jam-packed planning, practice, dreams and dilemmas. I wouldn’t wanna do it with anyone but these lovelies.
XOXO Maria
