Geneva Gibber

As my weekdays are minimally interesting (enjoyable, but not story worthy) I will fast forward to my Saturday festivities. Saturday was the Geneva Lake Parade, and I met up with the usual suspects, Chandler, Monica, and Joey, plus some of their friends around 3:00…

Sorry, I feel the need to digress a bit, back into my weekdays, to tell a story about a very special person that I met during class. My weeklong seminar was on humanitarian assistance (ie – food and water distribution, refugee camps, protecting women and children from abuse, etc.), and the group of students was consequently a very liberal assemblage of people – except Ben, the tragically clueless Mormon. I’m not implying that Ben is clueless because he is Mormon; he is just completely and utterly clueless. For instance, suggestions of corruption and bribery in developing governments shocked him to the core; he really had no idea that such things went on. This is especially remarkable because Ben is studying international relations at the Geneva Graduate Institute for International Studies, one of Europe’s finest IR schools. His naivety was bewildering, but back to the point of the story… this does all tie back to the aforementioned parade. Ben’s ignorance did not stop at failing to understand the nuances of the international world; he also did not seem to realize that the rest of our class wasn’t quite the Jesus loving, sin condemning crowd to which he was accustomed. This was most clearly revealed when I mentioned going to the Lake Parade that weekend, and he looked at me with horror in his eyes. I knew nothing about the parade, so I asked him what about it was so upsetting. His response was – “Well, ughhhh, gaaaaaah, it’s just that, maybe I shouldn’t be saying this but, the parade is full of GAY and LESBIAN people.” I think the daggers coming from my eyes were enough to give clueless Ben a bit of clue, and he shut up fairly quickly. Surprisingly, I’m not Ben’s biggest fan.

But back to the parade – After some cocktails at Monica and Chandler’s, the crew departed for the parade. I was pretty excited as Pride parades are always a good time. This one did not disappoint in terms of good times, but it wasn’t really a pride parade. It was a bunch of floats from different local clubs, with scantily clad people (some of whom, judging by their behavior, were not at all gay) dancing to techno music. Every float was basically the same, except the color of the clothing and the veracity of the float riders gyrating. Luckily, I was with company that I thoroughly enjoyed, so we danced to the music, took pictures with some of the parade participants, and had a grand time. Best part of the floats was definitely this guy - I think he thought I was checking him out, but I had to make that sacrafice to get the picture.

After the parade there was a “performance” by some local rap artists. I’m calling it a performance because there were people on stage with microphones, suggesting that they were in fact performing, but really the rappers had very little to do with the show. They pretty much just threw on some old rap albums, and then the men with mics sang along with the chorus. They actually played Hip Hop Hurray and Jump Around and when the chorus came on they would appear from the back corner of the stage and behave as if they were rappers putting on a show, throwing their arms around, trying to hype up the audience. It was really very sad. So we gave up on the show fairly early, and went back to Monica and Chandler’s apartment, where most of us quickly fell asleep. Good times.

# posted by Hoptrop : 5:27 PM