It really did start off as a potted plant. Buying a pot full of mums and ripping them into individual bundles turned out to be cheaper than buying already cut flowers, so Molly and I sat on the floor and twisted blossoms out of the shalllow dirt and tied them up with ribbon.
I'm going to skip a large section of what happened here. Lets just say that it was mostly composed of "GO GO GO GO GO" and then running, and knocking, and "GET IN THE CAR! GET IN THE CAR!"
Hurdle #1: Alicia's sitting on the freaking porch of the house her show is in.
"What do I do?"
"Just....be sneaky."
So I took a bundle and crept up the stairs as hunched over as I could get. When I was close enough, I hurled the flowers at Alicia, hit her smack in the grill with them, cleared the steps in a single bound and ran for the car.
"Wait! Come back up here!"
I turned around and threw my hands in the air, "I CAN'T! It's May Day!"
"GET IN THE CAR! GET IN THE CAR!"
**Tips for making people answer the door to find the flower you left them at 11:30pm on a Thursday.
1: Knock as hard as you can until you see someone on the stairs, then really run like hell because you've got an entire yard and a stree to cover and they've only got, like, 10 feet.
2: Knock, get in the car, wait a little bit to see if they answer. If they don't answer, lay on the horn full out until they come outside to see what's going on.
3: If they don't answer the buzzer, look in their livingroom window. If they're looking cozy and watching TV, scare the living shit out of them by knocking on the window.**
May Day, it turns out, is better for scariness than any other holiday including halloween. When I jumped out of the car and threw a flower at the woman in the way too short dress standing in front of Ozzies on Queen Anne, she screamed and threw her handbag in the air. When I jumpe out of the car and poked the pointy end of the mum at the guy by the bus stop, he rapidly backed away from me. "It's just a damn flower! Happy May Day!"
I chased a guy in a skirt up his stairs, but he was really trucking, so I missed the whole encounter and had to run back to the car before he came back outside.
The best, however, was pulling up at a stoplight next to a tricked out little honda with a couple of guys in it and the driver side window slightly rolled down.
"GO!"
"I DONT WANNA! I'M SCARED!"
"GOGOGO!"
So I threw open the car door, slammed the flower through the window gap. The Driver screamed, I screamed, he screamed. "Ah shit man! Happy May Day!"
I got back in the car and molly tore through that red light without thinking twice.
Giving people flowers is awesome.
Bonus!
See Molly's take on the whole thing, and see the details I conveniently left out.
Lies! All Lies! (except for all that true part in there.)
Lucky for you you're such an extra-white girl. Cops shoot brown people for less every day.
Which reminds me, for some reason, of a comedy skit (paraphrased here):
"Hey, that smells good. What is it? Lamb?"
"Nope. It's muppet."
"Muppet?"
"Yeah. Them's good eat'n."
"Oh yeah? How d'ya hunt 'em."
"Like this: [yelling out to nobody in particular] Hm, I wonder how many plates there are on this table..."
[muppet pops through window and says] "There are three! Three plates on that--" [man clubs muppet with baseball bat]
"Just toss this one in the stew pot with the others, hey?"
And I'll just say up front that if Chris Comte tells me where that actually comes from and quotes the original skit verbatim, I fully intend to punch him right in the throat.
also lucky for you you live in seattle. if you did that here in LA, the cops wouldn't come, but you'd get shot or run over by the people you tried to give flowers to. ah, such a happy town.
you're the greatest.
Posted by: logan at May 2, 2003 11:10 AMIf you did that in Northampton, people would chase after you trying to give you patchouli, or a little book of poetry!
"Come back here! Karma! Must balance the scales!"
Rough town.
(By the way, that is the coolest May Day tradition evah!)
Posted by: bryant at May 2, 2003 12:38 PMTwo things:
Fat Boys: Cinco de Mayo strikes me as another excellent holiday for potential scariness and it's really freakin' soon.
Joshua: PS I also love that sketch and am refraining from identifying my favorite line as that would make me a) obviously the geek that I am and I prefer to think no one knows and b) I don't want to be punched in the throat.
Posted by: Ida at May 2, 2003 01:16 PMBy the way, thanks for the flowers. They are nice.
Posted by: flamingbanjo at May 2, 2003 04:21 PMYes, yes and freaking yes! This is an absolutely heavenly way or terrorising the good people of the world.
Mayday Mayday *sorry*
Posted by: shrinking violet at May 3, 2003 01:07 AMVery good site, congratulations!
Posted by: Nick at January 13, 2006 05:51 AM