This past Saturday, while on a run, I saw a woman wearing a shirt that simply said “Sept 21” on the front. As I ran past, I turned around to see if there was anything else on the back, but it was blank. I remembered that Saturday was indeed the 21st of September, so I was obviously forced to assume that this woman owned 366 shirts, and she wore each of them on their specific day of the year.1 While this seemed a rather inefficient way of remembering the current date, literally nothing else made sense.
Bizarrely, however, this rational and logical conclusion was actually (most likely) incorrect. It turns out that in 2016, comedian Demi Adejuyigbe turned September 21 into the best new holiday in ages, and he’s been doing fabulous work promoting it ever since.2 That year, he posted his first video set to an edited version of Earth, Wind & Fire’s song “September”.3
If you need a pick-me-up of any sort, that 66 seconds is pure bliss. In that video, you’ll also spot the original shirt design, apparently made just minutes before the video with a stencil and a marker. This is essentially what the woman I saw had as well. It makes a lot more sense here, with a soundtrack, rather than in a vacuum.
By September 21, 2017, the world seemed a much darker place than it had just a year earlier. Still, Adejuyigbe returned, trying to fight back the gathering horror.4 We now had two full minutes of September 21st-related goofiness, just when we needed it most.
The festivities continued, and indeed grew larger, in 2018. That year’s video featured a body double, a tear-away jacket, and a children’s choir.5 It also included my very favorite moment, a brief mention of “December”, followed by an immediate course correction back to September.
This year, we got a marvelous single shot video, including a mariachi band and some hilarious video editing to place Adejuyigbe into the original Earth, Wind & Fire video.6 It continues to be tremendous fun. We now have over four full minutes of delightfulness, which is longer than the original song. Wonderful!
While I came late to this party, I’m fully on board now, and eagerly looking forward to September 21, 2020.7 If you want to get into the holiday spirit yourself, you can purchase your own confusing t-shirt. Since 2018, Adejuyigbe has sold September 21 t-shirts to raise funds for some very worthy charities. It’s too late to use such a shirt properly in 2019, but the next September 21 is getting closer all the time. Personally, I can’t wait to celebrate in slightly less than a year.
Footnotes:
That February 29th shirt is really not getting much use. ↩︎
Adejuyigbe is surely best known for his work in Sandwich Video’s tremendous “How to Vote” project. ↩︎
Also, November 3rd, 2020. ↩︎
