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[September 15, 2006] Last year I discovered the concept of pillow fight club on Wikipedia -- a flash mob, where a large crowd gathers in a public space, and at a prearranged time they all pull out pillows and beat the crap out of each other. It's the sort of idea that makes me glad I exist.

So I was terribly delighted to open Willamette Week the first week I was in Portland to discover a group called Pillow Fight PDX had turned it into a recurring event, with a fight scheduled for the end of the week.

I bought a small heart-shaped throw pillow at Goodwill (both for the irony of beating up people with it, and so I could give it to a friend who likes such things afterwards) and showed up at O'Bryant Square a half hour late. There were still several hundred people there, mostly spectators, but in the middle was a clump of between 50 and 100 folks at any given time, clobbering each other with pillows.

The number of combatants would dwindle at times, and then with a shout a new group would come running into the mix of it, adding more cotton batting and feathers to the mess. At one point, a guy who looked a bit like a high school football player took charge, splitting the battle down the middle. "You can take our lives, but you can't take our freedom!" someone shouted in a Scottish accent, and then the two sides surged at each other.

The crowd really got into the silliness. "I've got bandaids!" a girl bearing a first aid kit yelled. "Q-Tips! And condoms!" There were lots of people in costume; at one point a guy was getting his picture taken on the lap of someone dressed as Santa, and when I swooped in with my camera for my own picture he yelled "Everyone sit on Santa's lap!"

I ran into Mike, the Aussie bloke from the hostel I'm staying at. "Do you have a photo of someone about to hit you in the camera with a pillow?" he asked, and then swung his pillow like a windmill until I got a good picture. "I look like an evil yuppie!" he exclaimed when he saw it. I also followed him around a bit with my camera, figuring if I wanted to sell an article about the whole thing I could interview him later, or at least easily get his full name. (He confessed afterwards that he was targeting cute girls, and after hitting them with his pillow, he'd flirt with them.)

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Portland Space Hijacking, popular places, One Gigantic Life

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portland , keep portland weird , pillow fight , pdx pillow fight , flashmob , weird portland , space hijacking , space hijack