Best Fake Tales of San Francisco, pt.3: Parade Superstars

Now it's Saturday. Last Saturday. But you knew that, because today is only Friday.

In the afternoon I met up with Jen and met her son Owen for the first time. We went and ate hamburgers at this place. My burger was inexcusably delicious.


Then I went over to Duboce and met up with Betsy to take the Muni (which, apparently, is some sort of train) downtown.


I debated with myself about whether or not I'd post this picture . . . oh, why not.


Betsy specializes in the self-photo.


So here's the deal. Saturday was the big Chinese New Year Parade. Becca has this job with BART and part of her job description is driving the BARTmobile in parades. And guess what? She needed BARTmobile passengers for the New Years Parade. I've never volunteered more quickly to do anything. But when we got downtown we found Paul, another parade-participant-to-be, and we found the BARTmobile, but we couldn't find Becca.


It made me kind of nervous, the excitement of being in the parade coupled with how Rebecca was nowhere to be found.


But finally she appeared! She had just been trying to find classy Chinese decorations for the BARTmobile!


We had to decorate it really fast!


And then we were ready to roll!


And by "roll" I mean sit and wait.


But were we not sitting and waiting we wouldn't have seen Frank Somerville from KTVU Channel 2 News roll up in his special parade trolley (still no idea who the dude in the blue is, though)


But then things started to move . . .


And I was like, "Are you ready, front seat?!"


And they were like, "Are you ready, back seat?!"


And the guy in charge was like, "Let's PAAAAAAAARTY!"


And we were on our way!



We were right in front of the Highway Patrol portion of the parade, meaning we made lots of new friendly cop friends.




Here's the question: How many pictures of crowds and whatnot do I need to show you to properly convey the main idea, which is: "We were in a parade."




The BARTmobile had a banging stereo and played "You Shook Me All Night Long," "I Love Rock n Roll," "You Spin Me," "Video Killed the Radio Star," "Since You Been Gone," and "Do You Want To?" over and over. "You Shook Me All Night Long" and "Since You Been Gone" were by far the most popular of our songs, and when we played "Do You Want To?" the crowds mostly just stared at us blankly, except for the occasional cool kid, who'd give us a "Yeah, that's what's up" kind of look.



These are the fancy people who paid for the fancy seats





A final shot of our favorite cop:


And that's pretty much what it's like to be in a parade. It's a pretty good job, I'd consider it as an occupation.