Tilda Swinton's 8½: Will You Dance Along Next Saturday?

You may have heard about this already but it took me days to process. For just when it seem liked Tilda Swinton had scaled all available Mt. Awesome peaks, she went and invented a new way to be awesome. Her latest project is named after Federico Fellini's masterpiece and it's way cooler than any other derivative thereof.

<--- This isn't a new photo of Tilda but I feel certain that Federico Fellini would endorse it.

Here's the description of the 8½ Foundation from the official site

What great movies would you give to a child on their 8½ birthday?
8½ is a great age to fall in love with cinema, and so the 8½ Foundation aims to give all children an 8½th birthday, glimpses into new worlds and cultures, into magic and the heights imagination can take you to.

The Foundation is holding a flash-mob style kick off on June 26th in Edinburgh where Tilda (and anyone else who shows up) will perform a Laurel & Hardy dance. No joke. Here's the dance. You're supposed to learn it beforehand.

The instructions

On Saturday 26 June 2010 at 10:45, come rain or shine, we’re gonna meet at Festival Square, Lothian Road, Edinburgh. At exactly 11:00, music will start – The Avalon Boy’s ditty “At the Ball”. It’s a song from Laurel and Hardy’s funniest film Way Out West. In the film, Stan and Ollie do a wee dance, one of the most charming, amusing musical numbers in cinema history.

In tribute to Stan and Ollie, and to dancing in public and in unabashed celebration of doing something as a group and looking like dafties…when the music starts, we will put down our newspapers and do the Laurel and Hardy dance.

I don't have the funds to fly to Edinburgh next weekend but I think I'll learn the dance and do it in my living room at 5:45 AM EST 06/26 for my Tilda across the Atlantic. If any readers want to join me take a picture so we can all pretend we did it together. I either have to do this or convert my apartment into a Shrine to Swinton for the purposes of daily worship. For what actress is more deserving of such devotion?

P.S. I Am Love (Io sono l'amore) opens today. It's grand. And Tilda wears the loveliest things in it. See it.