Sammy and Adrian are like seven feet tall

My friends were planning on spending the weekend in Philadelphia, so I tagged along. My only responsibilities would be to help out with the voter registration drive they had planned. It didn't take that long to get there, either. For some reason I thought it would take all night but it was only a couple of hours. First stop was an after-party for somebody art opening at a house converted out of an old ice cream factory (scroll down and look for "Shearer's Ice Cream"). There was a lotta food and a DJ playing what appeared to be my 9th grade cassette collection, heavy on the Goth.

Adrian's gonna make me take this down, I just know it

Around midnight we headed over to the Khyber to see Oneida. I was pleased that they recognized me, as I'm never sure how much of an impression I make on people.

Nobody in my party had ever seen Oneida before, but no one was disappointed by the show. Everybody agreed they're an amazing band. I was a little disappointed to find the drinks weren't much cheaper than New York, but every single bar i entered had Powers in stock. That's got to count for something.

Then it was back to Sammy and Kate's house. Their ground floor used to be a bodega, so as a living/dining room it's enormous. Speaking of enormous, they have 3 cats who are also enormous. I don't believe they meet or exceed Mr Bones dimensions, but taken together they're pretty impressive.

Saturday started slow. I slept like a rock, but had to fight some of the cats, who kept knocking over my water glass. We ate a bunch of food and drank several gallons of coffee before heading out to try to register some voters.

Our hosts, Sammy and Kate, with some hippie guy

Mister Vernon

I dealt with New York withdrawal with a coffle table book of NYC photographs

Saturday was a constant downpour, so we were not optimistic about our chances. We planned on hitting some part of town that would have a large number of unregistered folks to canvass. We drove around for a while, eventually settling on some part of town that looked promising.

It was tough finding anybody to register, but Adrian just started flagging people down on the street, or going into shops and asking the employees. Most people were already registered (or so they said), but we found a couple of people who were interested, including a dry cleaner, a parking lot attendant, and a fireman (who actually just wanted a form for his daughter).

We kept at it for a few hours, then retreated back to the bar for some consoling drinks. Had we known what we were about to walk into, we'd probably have done several rounds of shots.

Officially done with trying register people, we went to South Street to find a cheesesteak. We stopped in some bar to use the ATM, and casually asked the patrons if everybody was registered to vote. Well, this led to an argument. I couldn't tell if the barflies were Republican or just lazy, but they took the question as an insult and started hurling abuse on our party. The implication was that if we wanted to get people to vote, we must be filthy hippies who hate America. How the hell did things get like this? The mood wasn't all that threatening, these guys were more interested in just having something to holler about, but it was awfully disappointing from a 'human condition' standpoint. As we were leaving they did the old move of singing "Na na na na, hey hey hey, GOOD BYE." Maybe we get the political leadership we deserve ...

Part Deux

Comments [ ]