'Bred Crumbs
10.06.02
After delightfully teasing us for a couple of weeks, San Francisco summer finally arrived in full force just in time for the Castro Street Fair today. The effect was that a newcomer would have sworn the city had passed a law forbidding men to wear shirts.
There are a couple of things that can slightly dim my enjoyment of even the best festival. One is the risk of my own clumsiness: if I look up, I'll bump into something; if I look down, I'll bump into someone. Another is when someone else tries to inflict his/her/its way of enjoying the proceedings directly onto you, which happened to Robbie twice today.
The first time, I heard him yelp suddenly and say, "What the hell?" He did this because someone had bitten him on the ass.
The culprit was an older/middle-aged man. His excuse was, "You told me to." What he meant was that the T-shirt Robbie happened to have on said BITE ME on the back. Anyone who has a grain of sense or is not desperate and pathetic would not for a moment take these words literally, but unfortunately we were dealing with this loser. We parted ways from him as quickly as possible; Robbie was much less bothered by the whole incident than I was.
Besides, did the shirt say BITE MY ASS? No. So what was chomp-man's justification for that?
Later, we were standing and resting near the Latin music stage after threading through the crowd for a while, enjoying the scenery, when suddenly some girl we didn't know was grabbing Robbie's hand and tugging on his arm. We responded in some puzzled, polite way that we didn't know who she was or what she was doing, and, indicating our cameras, she maddeningly perkily said, "You're photographers? Well, don't watch, participate! Come dance!" And she made another attempt at grabbing his arm and pulling him out into the street where others were dancing.
Robbie is not a dancer. This is perfectly OK. What is not perfectly OK is that annoying tendency of some outgoing people to assume that we would all be better off if we behaved exactly like them. Last time I was in New Orleans, there was one night I was exploring the bars of the gay end of Bourbon and two separate people told me to smile more and have fun. Thing was, I was having a right nice time, enjoying my drinks and the ambience. I just wasn't standing around grinning like an idiot as if I were auditioning to host Trading Spaces or something. Furthermore, I made new friends, wink wink, before the trip was over without pretending to be a toothpaste commercial.
Robbie pulled his arm away from the self-appointed joy enforcer, and we suddenly adopted the tactic of ignoring her, then walked away. By then I'm sure she'd set her fun-fascist sights on someone else. Maybe someone who was interested in being asked to dance by a female.
Despite these intrusions, the day was a fine one. And of course, the now omnipresent Cheerful Walking Penis was there. Lots of folks wanted their picture taken with him. Everyone loves the Cheerful Walking Penis. Even tiny lesbians love the Cheerful Walking Penis. I saw one high-five him.
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