What happens when you and your friends dress up like frontiersmen and women and push a covered wagon down the Venice boardwalk? You end up having to literally flee from the cops. And that is a really sweaty and difficult thing to do when you are drunk and in full costume.
The event is the Urban Iditarod. It's a secret pub crawl in which a few hundred people form teams, "borrow" a shopping cart, dress in themed costumes, get inebriated, and make a spectacle of themselves in public. Since I'm good at all of those things, I participated in 2009 and 2010 as well.
My team chose Oregon Trail as our theme this year because it's nostalgic, cholera jokes are the best, and my friends are creative enough to make a rockin' covered wagon out of a shopping cart with just a sheet, some cardboard, and hula hoops. In addition to a lot of pioneers, we had a couple of Indians ("No offense" Ben's shirt read), an ox, and a buffalo. Even though there are no official "winners," the other teams were declaring us the winners because of how slick we looked when we reached the starting line.
Unfortunately the cops, who are wise to our ways after the years, were also waiting at the starting point and started issuing tickets before the event even began. I don't blame the police entirely. They'll give you some leeway when there's some plausible deniability; for example, our team consumes all of our beverages from soda and water bottles. However, when you are openly shotgunning Bud Lites next to the cops, they're going to ticket you, and if you give them guff for it, they're going to cuff you.
Rather than running between pubs like in the past, we ended up just fleeing from the police. We ran down random alleys and barely had a proper chance to catch our breaths. At one point we were trapped between a deep puddle and an oncoming police car and the other teams were shouting at us to quickly "calk the wagon and float it across." It was exhilarating in that sense, though I personally wasn't too worried about being arrested. Cuz let's get real here: more than racial profiling, cops douche profile. When they randomly start citing people, of course they're going to go choose the guy with an lewd statement scrawled on his wifebeater or the girl with her boobs spilling out of her outfit. If anyone were to ask, we were just a bunch of historical re-enactors who got mixed up with the wrong crowd.
Since other people had already quit, gotten lost, or in a few cases been apprehended, we no longer had the benefit of "safety in numbers." Once people started getting ticketed for stolen shopping carts, we dropped out of the race and made a beach day out of it. We stayed in costume and danced jigs to the bluegrass cover songs we brought and made a spectacle of ourselves all over again. In a way it was actually better once we were separated from the other teams, because we looked even nuttier to people out of context.
I love all of my fellow Oregon Trailers, and I'm glad to see that none of us fell prey to dysentery, snake bites, or even the police for that matter. Though we made it to the Pacific Ocean, we didn't quite make it to Oregon. Maybe we'll try again next year, but I'm going to need a year to think about it.
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