Saturday, June 25, 2005
Breakfast: smoot froothie (strawberries and blueberries), English muffin. Cut my hair, showered, cleaned the bathroom. Logo type set work for Corinna. Tidying. More camping prep. Lunch at home with Patrick: biryani, coconut shrimp, battered fish. Nap. Dinner at La Mediterranee with Patrick: appetizer combo (baba ganoush, taboule, hummus), 2 orders of pomegranate chicken, Patrick had a red tail ale, water for me. Service was slower than usual because today was Pink Saturday. It was perhaps the first time we'd ever seen more women than men in the restaurant. The food was delicious and perfectly prepared, as is always the case. One of our servers accidentally tipped over Patrick's half-full beer glass when she returned to the table with some bread, so she got him a new one at no charge. It took us about half an hour to alternately get through the line for the restroom at the end of our meal. But despite all this, we remained in a cheery mood and still had a lovely dinner. It's Pride Weekend! A gay.com double-decker bus was parked outside La Med. The top deck had no roof and we could see lots of people congregating, though I couldn't tell if they were doing anything more than talking. On the sidewalk a gay.com photo area was set up. It seemed they were trying to entice people to have their photo taken with suggestively clad gay.com employees (volunteers?) so that they could later pay for it on the web. It wasn't working I think because the people you could have your photo taken with weren't as gorgeous as professional models. Most of them wore gay.com-branded tank tops which were "artistically" cut with scissors a la Flashdance. One gay.com man wore a red thong underneath low-slung jeans, which I thought was more embarrassing than sexy. If they had, say, the guys from their football ad dressed in the same gear from the ad, or a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence, or porn stars, or even a fabulously attired drag queen, there might have been more of a line. We walked up Castro, paid our $3 each donation to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and it didn't take us long to happen upon others we knew: Andy, Sally, Eric, Ryan D, Ted, Emery. We met Alex and Mark (Marc?). Galen and Peter joined us a little later, then Scott with Brett and Katie, then Jason. The evening was cool with occasional gusts and a little drizzle now and then. Andy had gotten his photo taken with a naked man who danced alone to a boom box. (I couldn't make out what music the naked man played since music came loudly from so many different places.) A grunge band played in front of Cliff's Variety. Someone had toilet-papered the overhead electric bus wires at the intersection of 18th and Castro. Various DJ stages were set up at different places—we didn't even see them all because the crowd was so big and it would have taken too long to get to each one. It was very hard for Patrick to find a place to buy a beer—so hard that I think he gave up after a while. I didn't see a single portapotty, which surprised me—where were all these people going to relieve themselves? We ambled through the crowd of thousands, and it was obvious that most everyone was either drunk or very much along the way to getting there. We ended up at a restaurant called BS on 18th which—we were told by one of our friends—stood for "burgers and steaks." The restaurant was celebrating Pink Saturday with $2 drinks, and we stayed there for a while getting drinks and looking out the windows onto the melee in the street and enjoying 70s disco on a not-powerful-enough-for-this-event sound system. Andy pretended it was Mardi Gras but without the beads. On our way back to the MUNI station, Patrick and I glimpsed out of the corners of our eyes a man profusely spewing vomit from a standing position (and someone else photographing it), and it was not even the kind of horror that makes eyes stick like magnets. The instant I saw it, I looked away and sort of quickened my pace. It took a long time for an L train to show up, so I realized in the future we should just drive and park in West Portal for future events like these—that way we can take the first train going out, get out at West Portal, and drive home, saving us what can be 30 or 40 minutes.