Pride Day

A week ago Sunday was Pride Day. I spent from 9:30am until after 3pm on the deck of Milestones restaurant at the corner of Denman and Davie with five friends watching the phenomenon of Vancouver's Pride Parade. There were supposedly 500,000 people watching, which is rather scary, though I doubt I could see even 1,000.

The patio of Milestones has to be one of the primo spots to watch the parade from as it is reasonably comfortable seating and it is raised a metre or so above the sidewalk, making it easy to see and take pictures of the passing 164 entries. We arrived more than two hours before the parade, which because of its added length this year, took quite a while to reach our location more than half way along the route.

To get a seat on the patio on this day takes good connections. One of my friends, "Aunty Tinkerbell", has those connections with the staff as this was once his favourite hangout. As usual, he brought 'accoutrements' which this year were rainbow feather boas and his own hat which featured a swirl of netting and silk butterflies around it. He's the one on the right above with our waitress and her penis tiara.... Immediately below them in the feather boas are, from left to right, Randy (Mentor Aum), Peter (Rainbow Strongheart), Gerry and his husband Danzante.

The other nice aspect of the patio vantage is that it is in the shade, at least until shortly after 1pm, and that means less sunburn. So many places along the route have no shade and no place to sit. My feeble legs could not hold me standing for a long time and without this wonderful seat I was not prepared to watch the parade. If AT ever loses his priviledges with the restaurant I may never see another parade.

As I said, the route was longer. It still goes south-west along Denman St, turns south-east on Pacific and then Beach Ave to Sunset Beach, but this year it started on Robson St and went downhill (northwest) to reach Denman. It now takes more than 3 hours from start to finish.

It was a decent parade with some decent floats, not too commercial all in all, but it could have used more clowns or humour in general and definitely more music. It's too bad the Radical Faeries didn't have an entry because the parade could have used some of the "outside-the-box" imagination and irreverence. There was one terrible incident up in the Davie St Village when someone went biserk and started attacking patrons on a patio at The Majestic bar with a hammer. He sent several people to hospital, including two staff, though none of the injuries were life threatening.

After the parade I walked with several others along Pacific to Auntie Tinkerbell's new place near Davie and Pacific about 2 km away. There we had a pot luck dinner of sorts. I didn't eat much, just some chicken, corn chips and a few veggies. Two friends were kind enough to give me a ride up the hill afterwards. I measured my blood sugar once I got home. It was over 18 when it should have been no more than 10!