Bay to Breakers 2011

"That's awesome!" "I don't believe it!"  "You're the man!"  "It's fake!"   These are some of the many different reactions I received on Sunday when I took to the streets for the 100th Bay to Breakers race.  As you can see, I was "dressed" as Obama's Long Birth Certificate.  I was struggling to come up with costume ideas, but my focus was to be some sort of current event that SF people would appreciate as well as be something easy to construct.  (Another idea I thought of was being a Netflix Instant Queue).

The vast majority of people cheered in approval, but there were a few notable moments:

1)  A guy dressed up as the B2B Fun Police wrote me a fake ticket--he was stoked to have written Obama a citation.

2)  Another guy shook my hand and congratulated me as if I was the only person in the whole crowd with his head on straight.  "You da man.  This is real.  This is what's important!  Everyone else here's just a bunch of jokesters."

3) One girl came by, looking insulted, and asked, "Why would you do that?"

I answered, "What are you talking about?"

"Why would you make fun of that?  That's not right!"

I didn't even think someone would interpret the costume that way, but I quickly started laughing since the girl was clearly intoxicated.  I spent a couple minutes explaining to her that I wasn't really making fun of it and she was missing the point.  Eventually, she acquiesced, and I think I made a new friend.  She said, "Ok, well if you're not making fun of it then that's cool.  You're cool."

For those who thought race officials were going to crack down on alcohol consumption and public intoxication, police did take away blatantly open beer cans and broke up public demonstrations of beer binging (circle of friends cheering on one guy laying on the sidewalk as they all poured beer into his mouth) at two different points along the route, but I didn't see any drunk tents or anyone getting escorted off the course.  There's really just no way they can stop it.

So, the moral of the story:  Bay 2 Breakers 2011 was a huge success and the party lives on!