This year I’ll be wearing black to the Edwardian Ball.

Now, this won’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. Anyone who has taken a cursory look through my wardrobe can tell you that I make my way through life clad in varying shades of black and ash. Every once in a while I get really crazy and throw a streak of crimson into the mix. This has led to an occasional, incredibly specific sort of cat call when I’m out in public. “Hey babe,” I’ll hear someone shout on the street corner. “You going to a funeral or what?”

Well, if anyone asks me that while I make my way to the Edwardian Ball, I can confidently reply that I am. Why? Because for me, the Edwardian Ball is my own personal funeral for Boring.

There is no other city on earth and no other community I can imagine as vivacious and creative as what I’ve found in San Francisco. The Edwardian Ball serves as a perfect stage of all the whimsy, decadence, and playfulness I’ve come to love about living here. I can’t think of another event or another place on earth that has done such a thorough job of banishing boring from its boundaries.

For me, boring died years ago when I decided that I wanted to live in a city full of weirdos, artists, game changers, and troublemakers. Boring really needed to die. Boring brought complacency and blandness to my life. If I had kept boring alive for much longer I might have stayed in my sleepy hometown. If I had kept boring alive I probably would have scoffed and rolled my eyes if someone described an event like the Edwardian Ball to me.

This year’s Edwardian Ball is an especially important funeral for me. Over 2012 I lost a lot of things. Relationships, family members, and friendships died both literally and metaphorically. I’ve recently found myself wishing I could resurrect boring and go back to another place and time where things were calmer.

Then I thought about it and realized that dancing until dawn surrounded by circus performers, ballroom dancing, and ladies clad in corsets sounds like a much better time.

I don’t mean for this funeral to be a somber affair. Quite the opposite, actually. This funeral is far less of the lily-scented, sobbing-into-a-tissue event and more of a raucous, joyful, sazerac-soaked jazz funeral celebration of a life without boring. The Edwardian Ball is where freaks of all flavors come out to shove boring across the river Styx. This is where we come to put on our dancing shoes and ring boring out from our lives with dancing, singing, laughing, and aerial-silk-swinging.

You don’t have to dress in your finest to attend this funeral. You don’t even have to wear black. Your attendance and participation is your way of paying your last respects to boring. By attending, you are also solidifying your place in a community so vibrant and rich that there is no chance of boring ever rising from its grave.

Come with us and dance upon the grave of boring. I’ll be there, wearing black.

KC Crowell is a freelance writer and recent graduate from San Francisco State’s Journalism program. She maintains a personal blog at singlevoice.net where she can often be found writing about radical politics, life in San Francisco, and confronting sexism within the tech community. She occasionally says clever things on Twitter.

Photos by Audrey Penven and Neil Girling / The Blight

This post is part of a series showcasing the fabulous diversity of The Edwardian Ball. Have an Edwardian Tale of your own? Share it with us, and you could win tickets to the Edwardian!