Observations from The Strut

Strut - Sheena Easton (mp3)
Strut - Cheetah Girls (mp3)

The Bessie Smith Strut is an annual Chattanooga tradition, a Monday around which all portions of The Noog community gather on Martin Luther King Boulevard to enjoy music, vendor grub, and beer all in the name of togetherness, drunkenness, and blues baby blues.

For the second straight year, I was bullied and intimidated into attending Chattanooga's largest annual no-admission event by my BOTG partner in crime, and that's why you've gotta love Bob.

Originally I'd planned to write something about vampires today, but you can't be all hungover from Strutting and then not write about The Strut. So here are some observations from this year's adventures:

WHERE ARE YOU DIAPER LADY?
Last year, a super-skinny black woman in a neon shimmery green matching bonnet and diaper hung out near us and danced almost as badly as she dressed. There was no such lady this year. The freak eye candy wasn't nearly as fun this year, although we did have one guy who looked like he'd been excommunicated from the Hari Krishnas, and a large number of people with their entire bodies covered with terrible tattoos. (No, I'm not saying tattoos are terrible; I'm saying that the tattoos covering these particular bodies were terrible.)

POLISH SAUSAGE IS DA BOMB
After four beers, and after standing in 93-degree heat (heat index: 101) for a couple of hours, very few food items would taste bad. I ordered a delicious Polish sausage and ate it so fast I had to convince myself it wasn't just a dream. Unfortunately, Bob forgot a very important rule of food purchases: Make sure your Polish Sausage isn't charred black to the core. In all my years of knowing him, I've never seen Bob react to a bite of food like he reacted to his first bite of that Polish Sausage. In fact, his reaction was almost exactly like the lady's reaction to her Whammy Burger at the3:32 mark of this clip from "Falling Down."



GOD IS WATCHING US... BUT FROM A SAFE DISTANCE
It's called "plausible deniability," and God wants it as much as anyone. He's definitely watching us, as Bette Midler insisted so many years ago in her cheesy awful song, but I think He stays at a distance more for His sake than for ours. At moments, being at the Strut reminds you why humanity is so cool. Then overweight redneck white men start showing up with signs and handing out cards explaining why we all shouldn't get along because God will smite those who don't worship Jesus exactly the way overweight redneck white men do.

IF IT WALKS LIKE A DUCK...
Chattanooga, for all the great reasons to enjoy this town, has suffered a little bit of a crime relapse lately, and especially in gang-related matters. We had a shooting in a downtown park a few months back where the police insisted it "wasn't gang-related" even though numerous bystanders observed that the conflict involved two different groups sporting two very distinct and consistent color choices in their clothing. Last night, the Strut ended with serious crowd panic and dispersal -- although I never heard a gunshot, someone familiar running past me said he did. As I hopped on my scooter to find my next bottle of water, I motored past nine young black males, all wearing either red shirts, red bandanas, or red belts. Lot of red. Now, with as little as I know about anything, particularly inner-city life, maybe I'm jumping to unfair conclusions to say it was members of a gang. Maybe they were a soccer team. Maybe they were all wearing Spain jerseys in anticipation of their World Cup match. Maybe they're volunteer firemen. But I'm gonna go with the theory that it was a gang.

TANK TOPS... A GUILTY PLEASURE
This one probably speaks for itself. I probably shouldn't make much of an effort to explain it further. They're kinda cheap and low-class, but my goodness they can look nice.

"ARE YOU GUYS GAY?"
Bob and I concluded our evening at a local dive where they were holding Trivia Night. After we proved ourselves marginally useful for one team of competitors, the crowd mostly died down, and Bob and I sat at the bar nursing the night's final beer. Some early 20s dude in a white button-down over a white wife-beater and carefully-manicured hair pulls up next to Bob with the tremendous introduction: "Are you guys gay?" Bob and I looked at one another and shrugged. If I recall, Bob's response was something like, "Maybe, but we have five children between us."

Point is, if some dude you've never met comes up to you and starts his conversation with that question, please don't let him sit down and destroy whatever conversation you were having with your not-gay friend of the same sex. Especially if the kid was home-schooled and looks like a mix between Ducky and Patrick Dempsey from Can't Buy Me Love.

Consider yourself warned.