I saw Juan Mann's video and thought that it was something I really wanted to do. This past saturday (Sept. 22, 2007) Grand Rapids, Michigan Held it's annual Easttown Street Fair. Basicaly this event is a gathering of vendors, people, and live music in the area known as easttown. Hundreds of people come out every year to eat food, listin to music, socialize and the like. Me and a friend of mine decided it would be a great place to try the 'free hugs' thing out. It was!!! We passed out hundreds upon hundreds of free hugs simply by hold up a brite neon green/yellow with "free hugs" sharpied good and bold on it. Well, I had the free hugs sign and she had a sign that said "Smile You Are Beautiful", however we both were asking and passing out hugs. We had such a great time that we kept at it for four hours. If it weren't for hunger and needing to get off of our feet, there is no telling how long we would have kept it up. We actually got 'high' off of the response that we got, an our enthuasim was spread with each hug we passed out! We got so many truly heart felt thanks from so many people. Today we did a search on the street fair and came up with picturs and even a blog:
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yesterday i went down to the eastown street fair just to see 256 play. its always fun to go around eastown, there is definitely a different group of people from around there and coming from rockford which is about as non-diverse and close minded of an area as you will find around here, its very refreshing being around that sort of an atmosphere. 256 was pretty fun, they sounded really good. it was awkward though with things not being great between juan and i right now, because he and his girlfriend both promised me they would come out for my birthday and then on my birthday they both ended up blowing me off for total bullshit reasons, and they have both been acting very selfishly lately, so it's just getting very frustrating and last night at the show i didn't talk to either of them.

the neat thing that kind of just for that moment in time just calmed all the stress in my life and made me feel good for a brief moment in time was this girl walking around with a sign that simply said "smile you are beautiful", which i saw her right after the guy with the sign that said "free hugs" haha. but i don't know, maybe most people would see that and think it's kind of weird or dumb, but i was just standing off by myself looking around, and for a second made eye contact with that girl and couldn't help but smile. it's dumb but at the same time was very refreshing and calming, and i was like if only there were more people with a positive outlook like that, myself included. i tend to almost embrace my negativity (i know that's not the right word) but i kind of think negatively and don't do anything about it and it's a hard habit to break. but life is about learning and changing and i still have a long way to go.

( liveordietryin.livejournal.com/40...tml )
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Unfortunatly with so many people there, despite our efforts, we couldn't ask everyone if they would like a free hug, but even this person SEEING what we were doing brightened his day and helped him to reevaluate his way of thinking. This blog is a much bigger inspiriation than Juan's video, but Juan deserves all of the credit for giving me the idea to ever even try some thing like this. Thank you Juan and Livejournal user (Adam) so much for helping me to understand that ONE PERSON CAN CHANGE THE WORLD ONE HUG AT A TIME!!!!!!!!!
Thank you all as well for helping to make the world a little bit brighter of a place to live!!

Grand Rapids will be seeing a lot more of me and my big bright sign!

-Mikey

www.myspace.com/OrkinMann
or
michaelbelcher1@email.grcc.edu

P.S. and thank you too Kasey for helping me to hand out the hugs and the smiles!!!