Popsicles and Skateboards?

​Q: What do Popsicles have to do with skateboarding?
A: It’s the fingerboard.

It all started with a popsicle!

Ernon Troya invented fingerboards by bending popsicle sticks and making mini skateboards for the fingers.

Airboarding, like air guitar, is a real thing. Skaters often act out skate moves with their fingers without the fingerboards!

Also, finger surfing is a thing. Stones are put into small streams to create a little wave and people use mini surfboards for a doll-sized surf session. I might start exploring this as a way to create some magic tricks in nature, with water, and the boards.

Lance Mountain is often credited as the inventor of fingerboards as we know them today. He innovated off other other models and popularized them in the skateboard film Future Primitive. Fingerboards were seen skateboarding in sinks, mimicking the moves skateboarders do in pools. I might start doing this when I do dishes!

Fingerboards are often seen as a novelty in the media, but the boards often work as a way for skaters to sketch out trick ideas and then try them on their boards in the real world. There is sort of this micro/macrocosm effect of the puppet becoming the puppeteer.

Lance hinted on some deeper levels when he did an interview with Fingerboard Magazine:

"I think I will have to answer that by saying I don´t think skateboarding is a sport!  I guess sport means that you can take it and make some kind of competition out of it.  So there is an aspect of skateboarding that is competition. I don’t think skateboarding is not a sport at all, but I think there is much more to it. And with fingerboarding I think it is the same thing. It is more than a sport.”

Perhaps the skateboard and popsicle are connected - yes, it’s the origin of the fingerboard, but also, they both keep ya cool!

Happy Fingerboarding! ​​