worth laughing at

While I was home for the weekend, my sister flew into Columbus on her way back from New York. My foolish pretensions to adult city life are all to blame for what happened when Mom and I went to pick her up, because my mom would never have wanted to go to a Jazz and Ribs festival right in the middle of downtown at night. It was beautiful out, and we sat next to the Scioto river and listened to some good and some bad musicians improvise a musical style that we didn’t like to begin with… So it was supposed to be Brazilian jazz, but I could have sworn that half of the time it was two guys with mics, a tambourine and a pop bottle. You are being spared my imitations of them, but if you’re curious about the effect, try shouting “I visit my MAMA, I forget me shamPOO!”, followed by beating perfectly innocent instruments while you make the sound of a UFO landing in a cornfield by breathing into your mic.

This got old.

We decided to explore the food and people-watching options. The crowd was tremendous and spilled across both sides of the river, joined by a bridge that was closed to cars. The lines at the rib stands were roughly proportional to the height of their signs and/or trophy displays. On the other side of the river we saw even more people, even more rib stands,  and heard a jazz piano that made us think that the other free concert was the place to be. We started walking across the narrow bridge lined with junk vendors.

Right before we got to the end of the bridge,  people started running, shouting and screaming.  I looked ahead and the whole crowd at the edge of the bridge seemed to be turning and running in our direction.  The crowd bottlenecked on the bridge and we pushed up against the edge and crouched down.  “Get out of their way!”  “We’re going to get shot!”  Two little girls next to us started sobbing and we all bent down and hung onto the chicken wire for a minute…  Then it was over, and the event police were all headed to the end of the bridge.  It’s hard to say what really happened, it was so fast.  Mom says she saw twenty black guys running and heard at least three gun shots, but there was a lot of confusion, and even if she’s right, that kind of thing doesn’t make it into the paper in a place like Columbus.

Then we left for the airport, with my mom on edge at the slightest provocation.  (Ok, so it didn’t help that some lady who was trying to cut into the turn lane called her an f***** b****.)  I doubt she ever goes back downtown.