A delightful new neighbor, who happens to be a beautiful, young heterosexual woman, had never been in town for the annual Gay, Etc. Parade which takes over our Civic Center neighborhood for a weekend.
So I promised to drag her to the parade with the following advice.
"You don't want to watch the parade because it's long, slow and dull. You have to march up Market Street instead."
We walked from Civic Center down Mission Street to the staging ground in the Financial District, arriving 90 minutes into the affair which was in its dull, corporate contingent stretch.
Shunning the evil Wells Fargo float, we marched onto Market Street with a group who self-identified as Levi's employees.
We walked faster than the parade pace and caught up with a tiny Emeryville group...
...which was trailing an Oakland fire truck covered with lesbians...
...and a float of glamour girls of all genders who were part of a large crew who were proud to be from Oakland.
In truth, the San Francisco Gay, Etc. parade has long been a venue principally designed for Bay Area suburbanites and greater Northern California, which is part of why it's fun. The tourists gets to go wild in the city streets.
Our favorite group that we marched with was an anti-circumcision platoon dressed in penis costumes...
...and carrying great signs.
The boss of my partner domestique has a 49-foot yacht, and to reward his workers for creating special effects for a Korean tsunami movie, he invited them for a Saturday cruise.
The boat is berthed on the northeast side of Tiburon, so we were able to cruise by homes belonging to the other 1% of the population...
...who are grotesquely wealthy...
...from the other end of the telescope.
The day was too exquisitely beautiful to spend much time seething with class resentment, though...
...and for every ostentatious yacht in the Sausalito harbor...
...there was a decaying sailboat covered in junk nearby.
My favorite Sausalito harbor story involves Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison and his 192-foot triple decker yacht which was called Izanami after a Shinto deity since Mr. Ellison, though Jewish, fancies himself something of a Japanese warrior. Somebody then took a picture and it was published mirror image in a boating magazine where the name backwards spelled "imanazi." The boat was subsequently renamed "Ronin."
FDR's old yacht, the Potomac, was also hanging out in Sausalito for the afternoon rather than its usual Jack London Square berth.
We continued past the Sausalito sewage treatment plant that's been dumping thousands of gallons of raw sewage into the bay over the last couple of years, possibly because rich people's waste doesn't stink.
Finally, our captain gunned the engine and gave us a thrill ride under the Golden Gate Bridge. It was too cool.
