She was all, "you're not even trying to get married, are you?"
Link only because it's not a CC license photo, and I choose to respect the choices of the artist who took the photo.
That's from Sunday down in Long Beach City during the Long Beach Pride Festival, where most of us froze our asses off until we started Thrilling because the weather is different in the morning on on coast, and like an idiot I forgot to bring a coat or something. I wasn't the only one.
Our Zombie Aztec organized this fabulous outing. He also let me use the silver wings (his are gold), and I had so much fun flinging those things around, and getting tangled up in them at first, that it was hard to return them at the event's end. I admit that at several points along the route I did Inappropriate Dramatic Zombie Wing Poses for cameras, in the hope that I could find pics on the internet(s) later.
We did the dance officially for 1.3 miles, but actually it was more like two. This was the first time I've ever tried to Thrill while marching, and it's tricky. We had to change some things up a little bit because we couldn't stop marching, but two of the women in the group figured out a way on the fly to make the dance work when you're not allowed to stop moving forward.
To me, the funniest thing that happened during the day was a bit of miscommunication between the pride parade organizers at the bleachers/media central spot and the parade organizers back at the parade start spot. The (fantastic) cheerleaders went on deck at bleachers/media central right before us. They ran long. The media central organizers told us to go out and do our Thrill anyway, and so we did.
But it seems none of the organizers at media central sent an alert that they were running a little late to the organizers back at parade start about 1/2 mile away. So the parade start people launched the parade on time, sending a phalanx of awesome Amazons on motorcycles down the street and right at us.
We were in the middle of dancing in the street when we noticed that there were a couple of hundred motorcycles barreling down on us. We kept dancing while looking at each other with W.T.F? Most of those cyclists stopped when they realized there were a bunch of zombies dancing in the street. But a scant number of them drove right into us, yelling Bad Words invectives for us to get out of their way as they drove into us with their motorcycles.
That. Was. NOT. Good.
But on the other hand, it's kinda hysterical to see dancing zombies run off the road by motorcycles.
I note the Bad Words invectives mainly because we had three children in our group that day - Thrilling has no age barrier - and afterward two of them mentioned how upset they were at being cursed at by these cyclists for doing what we had been told to do. For the record, the kids recovered once our part of the parade started.
Anywho, we ran onto the curb cuz we didn't want to Die By Amazon Motorcycle. In the spirit of the event, several of us zombies then cheered the cyclists as they zoomed by to start the parade, even though we were disappointed that we didn't have a chance to do the full dance in a stationary spot as the organizers requested. Upside, I caught an item thrown by one of them (or the group right behind them), and got a cool red bandanna! The other items in the plastic baggie I gave to a Bear guy who came out of the bleachers all in a friendly huff over my catching the swag in mid-air before it reached where he was.
What can I say? I got good reflexes. Always have.
The next day at the day job, standing by the copier with my hair still filled with pottery clay (which it will be for a good two weeks or so), I discovered that one of our Big Bosses was in the bleachers watching the pre-show, and was bummed that he didn't get to see us do the full dance. He wanted to see us do the full dance!
This Boss had no idea that I do this sort of thing on free time. I don't actually talk about Thriller dancing, Fair, the first ever stage show or the improv stuff when at the office. But he said he wanted to learn to Thriller, and join us at events! ROCK ON. I gave him one of the TTWLA cards and encouraged him to join us.
If you are local and interested, check out the website for the classes, which are all free and located throughout the region. We can teach you the dance in one hour, truly! Come learn, get on the mailing list to find out about stuff like LBC Pride Parade, or Doo Dah, or community events, or other things we do in between the big dance.
Then join us on October 23, 2010 for the official big dance. We want 15K folks. We're gunning to beat Mexico City, who cheated last year and beat us! (hee) One of the best things about coming out to learn to Thriller is variety of interesting people you will meet in this, The Greatest City In The World. It's fun, and *great* exercise.
