Costume

The evening immediately got better once Axl Rose changed into Winnie-the-Pooh.

Not that it had been all that bad so far, cavorting with the Cookie Monster and some sort of dragon/alligator/dinosaur thing with a healthy appetite for Pabst Blue Ribbon and even though it seemed like a relatively sparse crowd on such pleasant night, all things considered, for costuming up and pedaling off, Cookie Monster himself said it best when he described the assembled as a “lean, mean, problem-causing machine,” and it certainly seemed like that at the first two places we tumbled into, initially, a joint pretty much empty except for a drunk guy who wanted nothing better than to repeatedly toast his whisky glass into the balled-up paper tits of my own Sixties-folksinger-from-London’s-Carnaby-Street drag (call me “Donna, Donna Linda”) outfit and then next, what someone referred to as a “handbag party” at store that apparently sells boiled wool and polar fleece outfits to outdoorsy people who like to drive cars to spots at which they can don expensive gear and recreate until Sunday night when they motor back to the Eastside, but at which we were pretty much immediately asked to leave from unless, as the owner told me, we were prepared to buy some stuff, not, though she added to sound crass about it—as if “crass” might be an attitude that would bother someone who then spent the next half hour outside her store stealing sips from other people’s beers and cracking up as the Dinosaur sucked helium from pilfered balloons and flirted with bypassing coeds in a high-pitched pigeon Spanish while Pooh stayed in good humor at least until his supply of suds ran low.

Then it was back uphill to more or less where we’d come downhill from where Donna Linda arrived first, drank alone somewhat abashedly until others arrived, and then headed off, flower print dress waving in the wind, singing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” all the way home.