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.

Pink Saturday 2010

This year for some reason, they put a stage across Castro Street in front of The Sausage Factory, taking half a block off the usual area.  Maybe this helped contribute to the overcrowded-ness of the event.

The crowd was drunker and more unruly than I remember them being in recent years: a couple of women broke into the band circle to dance; several people tried to burst through the band just because it was their trajectory and they didn't want to walk around; one drunk guy reached around Danny while he was playing and tried to operate his slide for him.

Plus there was the shooting.  Luckily, we left around 11 o'clock, so I only heard about this on the news.

There were lots more naked guys this year, though.  Ever since I posted nearly two years ago about seeing naked guys strolling casually through the Castro, my blog has been receiving increasing numbers of hits from all over the world from searches related to the fact that it is legal in San Francisco to be naked in public.  So I don't know if we're turning into a mecca for people with strong urges for public nudity or if the locals are all just letting it all hang out.  I definitely saw one guy visibly on the horns of a dilemma.  He was standing in front of the Castro Theater, and he had his shirt of and his belt undone, holding the two ends of his belt in his hands.  He kept looking around to see if anyone was watching (though he did not seem to notice me watching him), and he repeatedly moved to re-fasten his belt and then unfasten it again.  In the couple of minutes that I watched him, he never made up his mind, even though naked men walked past him in both directions. 

More photos on the Flickr set.

"Hair" closing this Sunday

Hair highlights

These clips show the current cast, including Kyle Riabko as Claude, Diana DeGarmo as Sheila and Ace Young as Berger.

Of the four shows we saw last week, I think that "Hair" stuck with me most of all.

The original Broadway cast are performing the show in London.  Although the show has received broad critical acclaim, it still is not selling well in London and will close in early September.  And the show at the Al Hirschfeld Theater will be closing this Sunday, June 27.

Every show ends with the audience being permitted to join the cast on stage to dance.  And every show's "eParty" is posted on the show's website for people to watch later.  We were too tired to go onto the stage and dance, but this link will take you to the video from the performance we saw on Saturday, June 12 (which is still enjoyable even though I'm not in it at all).  But the camera appears to have virtually the same perspective as we had from our seats (front row mezzanine center).

Which is which?

One of these is a photo I took of kd lang in the late 1980s.

The other is a photo of my prized artwork, a painting of Elvis on black velvet that I purchased in Juarez in 1990.

Can you tell which one is which?

Hint:  kd doesn't usually wear muttonchops.