Smacking Strangers on Valentine’s Day.
To play: bring your pillow (or buy one).
Published in
3 min readFeb 15, 2015
Valentine’s Day in San Francisco is an annual pillow fight where hundreds of people gather in Justin Herman Plaza to smash strangers.
When you first enter the plaza, you can see and taste the feathers coating your mouth and nostrils.
It doesn’t matter who you are. If you can hold a pillow, you can play. Young children were in the crowd — just like the adults.
Capturing footage was a treacherous war zone. I was constantly slipping from the feathers and tried to avoid getting directly slammed by pillows.
Of course, concerned parents were the big spectators of the sport. Teens brought their GoPros and selfie sticks and stood on the elevated perimeter — like watching a gladiator battle.
My goal: To keep my pillow in one piece.
There were vendors at the side selling new pillows that you could destroy instead of the ones at home.
Any slight movement caused the feather stuffing to unsettle again.
Pillow fights are an intense workout. Many people go in and out of the fighting ring to rest.
