This weekend was spent in a state of temporal flux where time, sanity, and the elements collided to become all higgledy-piggledy. (That's a technical term, so I apologize if I lost anyone with that.) It started on Friday, when Deb and I went to get pizza fresh from Brooklyn. For those of you a tad bit shaky on geography, Brooklyn is a fair distance away from Tucson. Luckily for us, the Brooklyn Pizza Company is in Tucson, and they make honest to God real pizza! If you've never had pizza in the NYC/Long Island area then you've never had pizza. Sorry, but it's true. You've had a kitchen sponge with red stuff on it at best. We won't discuss worst.
On the way back from obtaining said real pizza, we got to see something that may just appear on an episode of Cops. Police choppers buzzing about overhead, sirens blaring, and a cop car stopped off to the side with its doors flung open and officers giving chase on foot. Pretty neat, but I wasn't paying too much attention. I had pizza and garlic knots to tend to, dammit!
Saturday found us hurtling back in time at the Arizona Renaissance Festival. I had never before attended such a thing, but as it was supposed to be a special Celtic weekend I was looking forward to it. The weather was great, we had discounted tickets... what more could you ask for?
In a word: entertainment.
The only things Celtic there were a couple of extremely pale people in kilts. This would normally be a novelty, if not for the myriad others in far more (unintentionally) alarming costumes. There were people from all over the country at this shindig. Most of them were fat. You need to understand... since moving to Arizona we've seen very few people of significant girth. (For my former co-workers out there, the term is "IRS fat".) Some people took great care to make their costumes, and they looked really good. Some people put on a dorky hat and called it a costume. Good for them. My biggest complaint with the whole thing was that we paid $18 each in order to have people beg at us and try and overcharge us for crap we didn't want. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it was that my ticket got me. Other than annoyed. But then, I can get that for free.
I will say that I did recieve my most unusual threat to date there. We were walking past one of the costumed flunkies, and said flunky was the one who said the threat to me. I was a bit annoyed at the place by this time, and my eye was bothering me, so I wasn't beaming with glee. He said: "If you're not smiling, I'm going to talk to you! This means you, man with the brown cowboy hat* and sunglasses!" Talk to me? Is that really the best you've got? A grown man with leather pants and a fake stuffed squirrel on his shoulder, and that's all you can give me? You need to work on your threats, Squire Zippy.
The following day, we went off to the Festival of the West. My eye was still bothering me, and was only half-open. It was also raining quite steadily. A hundred or so days without precipitation, and it rains on the day we're at an event. Most of the vendors closed shop, and there weren't really any shows going on. They still decided to charge us the full price for admission, though. How nice of them.
We did get to have a couple of brushes with greatness, though. For some strange reason, Ruth Buzzi was there. What she has to do with anything wild west-ish is beyond me, but she was there signing autographs and stuff. There were some others, but the biggie for us was Morgan Woodward. Why? Not because of his litany of western credits, but because he was both Dr. Simon Van Gelder and Captain Ron Tracey on the original Star Trek! How cool is that?
We left fairly early and headed back home. The rain got progressively worse, and for a while it was hailing. It's not often one sees frozen stuff on the ground in Arizona, so that was pretty interesting.
My apologies for not having pictures of any of this. My camera decided to have a breakdown and won't focus. Whee. Deb has some pics, though, so check her blog shortly for full-color madness.
* My "cowboy hat" doesn't look like a cowboy hat. I don't have a big belt buckle that says "Tex" or anything. It just wasn't a beret or Robin Hood pointy thing with a feather in it, so he called it a cowboy hat.
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