EP 67 Shadow Shorts # 11

Shadow Shorts #11 is out now! Recorded at BRC in 2025 participants were challenged to explain BM‘s impact in 5 minutes or less. Each Shadow Short is one person’s story, please enjoy this short story of how Burning Man has impacted and influenced people over time.

Meet Fly Trap, who describes Burning Man as a transformative "family reunion" that allows her to reconnect with distant friends through shared creativity and play. She highlights her rewarding shift from a solitary technical career to a physically active volunteer role at the event’s gate, where she enjoys the logistical challenges and the distinct, black-clad subculture of the staff. She shares how the collaborative spirit of burner culture empowers individuals to achieve the "impossible" in their daily lives, such as organizing complex, community-driven weddings rooted in the confidence and effort gained from the desert experience.

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Transcript

Before we start, I would like to ask your help to do two things. First, tell a friend or two who you think might like the show. And second, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The more reviews the show gets, the more likely it will even appear in search results. Thank you, and now on to the show. 

They make the trek out to Burning Man for a week and a day. After a lot of work, oh, there's a lot of play. Party party drama drama drama b**** b**** b****. Year after year, they come back to scratch that itch. They all say their lives have been changed. After many years, lives have been rearranged. That changes what this show is all about. You'll see the impact. of burning up and out. So sit back, relax, and cancel all your plans. These are the stories about the shadow of the man. 

Hello and welcome to the Shadow of the Man Show. I am your host, That Andy. This is a Shadow Shorts episode recorded at Bernie Man 2025. You can tell because of the background sounds. Okay, I have to apologize in advance for the variable sound quality. The microphones are quite sensitive and they picked up some noise from handling and occasionally the speakers allowed the microphone to drift away while speaking. Uh the sound might be more variable than the studio recordings, but the stories are fantastic. Please enjoy. Okay. My name is Fly Trap. I am from the Boston area. I currently live in Portland, Oregon. Uh I first came to Burning Man in 2014. It is now 2025 and I believe it is my seventh big burn.

Wow. What keeps you coming back?

I the most obvious factor is that I have recruited so many of my friends into coming and so it uh even if the place was boring and stupid, it's like a friend family reunion. So there's like a great place to see uh my friends doing their thing, right? Like my friends in a state of play and creativity. Um I love

local friends where you live or is it

um it's friend I used to live in the Bay Area and um so I don't see those friends as often anymore now that I live uh in Portland. So we we still see each other fairly regularly, but uh this is

family reunion.

Yeah,

that's usually what I would I used to tell when I fly into Reno and renting a car like, "Where are you going?" Oh, family reunion.

And as well as my my campmates, too, folks who I really don't see much through the year otherwise. And as far as I'm concerned, They live here.

Yeah.

You know, those are those are my friends who live here and I see them only here. Um,

so yeah, that's been a joy.

Uh, what else keeps me coming back?

I have started working the gate.

Oh, really?

Which is a job that I've come to really love. I work a pretty isolating job, technical isolating job in the default world. And um, gate is very peopleley. It's very physical.

Um, and it uh, keeps me in some skills. skills that I know I'm capable of and I know I used to have that I just don't exercise anymore.

And so I found that work to be very rewarding. It's also super fun to just like stick my head behind the curtain of how this place gets run and learn about all the all the ops of everything. I love it so much.

Yeah.

Um and of course uh it's grown an interest in art that I didn't really have before I started coming here. I don't identify as a creative myself, but I am so happy to enable folks who have that that inside them.

I actually have a a gate question.

Sure.

They all wear black and black on black on black on black.

Don't you guys get really hot in that sun?

Um I will say that interestingly uh black is not a required color. It is just the culture.

And I mean the actual swag that you that you earn and you get from there is black of course, but you can show up in a rainbow captain and run the gate if you want. It's just that I think it's this like implicit peer pressure thing we want to all feel feel and look the part because it's part of uh our identity and our interactions with uh the

one of the team.

Yeah, totally. And yeah, it can get pretty hot. I've learned to just have a bunch of different layers and coverups and hats and I like some of the jobs that I take are a little bit more shaded. I like the DOT, for example, because I get to hop under the shade pretty often.

And uh what of Burning Man do you take like home with you?

Like affect you like the rest of your life?

I This is stolen from from something I read somewhere. But uh the belief that unusual things are possible. Um for example, I had a summer camp wedding with my husband two years ago.

Oh, congratulations.

Um which was completely DIY and completely enabled by the talents of the people I love.

Um having the confidence to ask the people that I know to like flex their skills and help us with something make something beautiful and something that couldn't be made Otherwise, um I would never have been able to know that that was possible or have the confidence to ask for it and to and to build that. Um some of my family members who weren't exposed to burn culture were like, "Whoa, like look at all these people."

I had not seen you for years, so it's like wait.

Yeah. And and it wasn't like, you know, the the wedding was not about Burning Man or anything, but it was um enabled by many people who are

who have been built up by that culture and who understand what it means to put in really earnest effort. to make something beautiful as a group.

It was awesome.

And do you do any uh regional activity or events outside?

Uh wanting to do more. I went to Kiwi Burns ago after my very first Burning Man. So I wasn't fully like acculturated yet, but that was I mean so fun. Um and then I just went to my first soak in Oregon this year and certainly plan to keep going back to that now that that's our local

community. We're we're fresh to Portland so um you know obviously the burner crowd is a great resource. to dip into to to meet people, right? And so,

um, yeah, hoping to get more and more involved with the community.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's a big international community. I mean, you can pretty much like throw a dart and be like, I'm going to go there and be the first be like, hm, what burners do I know there?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah. Oh, guess we're just out of time. Well, thank you very much.

Oh, thanks so much. Great to talk to you.

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Thank you for listening to this latest show. We have to make another one. So, got to go. Don't worry. For next month, we already have one in the can. Very soon, you'll be listening to a new shadow of a man.