San Francisco Pride Parade 2010

It was a pretty standard parade.  Thanks to Carmex, my lips no longer felt like raw meat and I was able to play again.  We showed up on Spear Street at 9:45 and warmed up and rehearsed a little and decided what order we would march in.  Then at 11:30 we stepped onto Market Street.

I ran into Aidan, who was being a safety monitor.  He said that the periodic delays in the parade were due to Cheer San Francisco stopping to do routines.  I said it used to be due to ACT UP holding die-ins and protests, so the times and the causes are different but the effects are not -- the parade is still slow.

I found one minor flaw in the choreography they made us do for "I Want You Back":  we had to point our horns out for four beats, then in for four beats, and on more than one occasion, while we had our heads turned to the side, the people in front of us had to stop, and we didn't know it until four beats later, which caused a few near-collisions.  Oh, well.  This is how we learn.

We turned off of Market onto Eighth Street at around 12:30, so we were in the parade for almost exactly an hour.  Then we went up into the celebration.

I sat at the band's booth and played a couple of numbers with Heidi, Mike W and Mike M.  Then the guy who lives on Larkin under whose window we were playing came out to complain about the noise.  Parade officials came over and explained to him politely that we had a legal right to play if we wanted to, despite his complaints.

We wandered around Civic Center for a couple more hours after that, shooting video and snapping photos with pocket cameras and iPhones.  The full set of photos is up on Flickr. 

And now I'm tired and ready to go to bed.