2001-06-12

Pride (in the name of free food)

Warning: gratuitous name-dropping and self-congratulatory flagellation to follow...

Saturday was glorious, plain and simple. The band was invited to play the big Gay Pride Festival on the Common. Let me tell you -- big, organized outdoor concerts are the only way to go. We'd never been treated so well in the three years we've been together. Screw the club scene and their measly beer tickets; at Pride we got fed, we could hang out backstage all day long if we wanted to (which we did, being the parasitic sycophants that we are, let's face it), and we didn't have to pay for bottled water, a bonus well taken advantage of by Jef and Chris, who darted back and forth all day, grabbing water for their friends out front (hey, if my friends had stuck around long enough, I would've done the same thing). As Chris and I both repeated throughout the course of the afternoon: "The festival scene is beautiful," quoth Lee Ranaldo in "The Year Punk Broke."

Oh, then the Mayor arrived backstage. I'd been trying unsuccessfully to hula-hoop, under the patient tutelage of the Sugar Twins, when he arrived flanked by hunky gay cops (that's right -- gay cops). Honey Sugar abandoned the lesson, as she all of a sudden decided that it would be fun to get herself arrested by a gay police officer. She didn't, but spent the better part of ten minutes groping one of them, shrieking, "Arrest me! Arrest meeee!!!"

I didn't think I could come across as any more of a dork by the time the Mayor got around to shaking my hand, but as I returned his firm and surprisingly sincere handshake, I blurted out, "Cool! Hey -- thanks for coming out!" I didn't mean it that way, and I'm sure he knew that, but the rest of my bandmates gave me much shit for it, regardless.

The most beautiful drag queens ever were all over the place. They were so classy and polite; I felt like a dumpy scumbag next to them.

Let's see. Rusty, the Sugar Twins' bass player, came up to me during the Superhoney set and licked the side of my face. At that point I was tired and grimy from the seven thousand layers of sunscreen I had to put on during the course of the day; I hope I wasn't too rank when he did that.

Oh, and our set was pretty good. Bo played bass on a couple of songs, since our regular bass player Roland was out getting married that day (the nerve!). He stuffed a water bottle down his corduroys, in an attempt to simulate arousal. I was stone cold unimpressed, baby. I knew he was trying to make me mess up. He'll get his next weekend.

lisamcc at 11:22 a.m.

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