Big Shrimpin'

On Sunday we are crew of four: Sam, Ariel, me, and Ann. We go to one of the housing projects in downtown Cleveland and go door-to-door registering voters. Ariel teams up with a young girl who helps show her around- I think that this is fantastic because it’s so cool to get young people involved in the democratic process, especially since they can’t vote yet ;-) Jessica joins us for a while, too.

Then, the four of us go to the pavilion, a huge concourse downtown where Jay-Z and R-Kelly are having a concert. There are four entrances, and, since we are not allowed to go into the venue, we each separate and go to a different entrance to register voters and hand out Codepink fliers.

I approach a radio station booth and register some of the DJs. I put in a request that they urge listeners to register to vote since tomorrow is the last day to register to vote in Ohio. I enter their contest for the last pair of tickets to the show, and I fill out four entry forms- one for each of us gals. Then, I stick around the booth, registering new voters and waiting to see if there is any chance that they will call one of our names and we will win the tickets. And lo and behold, minutes later, they call out Ariel’s name!! I run over and, since Ariel is far away on the other side of the venue, I declare that I am Ariel. The DJ then informs me that to win the tickets I will have to compete with an opponent to eat 1 lb. of shrimp shmeared in cocktail sauce, in what is called a “Big Shrimpin’” contest, a play on the “Big Pimpin’” song. The winner will be the person who can eat the shrimp the fastest. My opponent is a tall, large man. The DJ asks him what he thinks about the shrimp, and he says, “This pound is going down!” He then turns to me and describes me as a “dainty girl wearing pink,” to which I reply with a shout out to Codepink on the radio, and a rebuttal of the claim that I am “dainty,” in favor of other descriptive words like “strong” and “outspoken.” Then the contest begins. Ann videotapes the whole thing. The crowd is shouting “Ariel! Ariel!” and we are eating all these shrimp. My strategy is to get all the shrimp into my mouth- I figure that’s the quickest thing to do, and I can worry about swallowing them later. I am thinking, “Okay, we need these tickets for Codepink! Do it for the team Rae-Rae…er… Ariel.” Even Ann is chanting, “You can do it Ariel. C’mon Ariel!” I am scarfing the shrimp and I can see my opponent beginning to slow down to my left. All the attention is focused on me and finally I am declared a winner!! Yeah Codepink! My hands and mouth are covered in red cocktail sauce and I feel disgustingly wonderful. Ann and I jump up and down (an interesting thing to do when you have a pound of shrimp inside your stomach…) and I get a free t-shirt and the tickets.

We skip-run-jog around the arena to where Sam and Ariel are flyering and exclaim in bursts what happened. Sam wants me to scalp the tickets to make a donation for Codepink, but I really want to go to the show. After all, I just ate a pound of shrimp so we could get Codepink inside the show! It is finally decided that Ariel and I will go to the show (after we find out that we can’t trade off the tix midway through the show). So we go in and we go to the ladies’ restroom and register women waiting in line to pee. Then we go to where our seats are, find that they are in the nosebleed section, and move down to a lower area. We spend a lot of time moving from seat to seat until we are finally caught, and we find a great spot to stand and dance for the remainder of the show. This is what I have to say about the Jay-Z and R-Kelly show: it was absolute madness- like nothing I have ever been to before. All glitz and glam and explosives and dancers and, most of all, lots and lots of sexual innuendo. The show began with a video clip of the “news” showing two renegade tour busses zooming out of control down the freeway, chased by a battalion of cop cars, and then all of a sudden everything went dark and then two real tour busses burst through the “brick” wall background of the stage, and the show began. The whole crowd put their hands in the air in the shape of a diamond periodically and Ariel and I had to ask someone what that was all about to discover that it’s the record label logo- corporate much? R-Kelly spent whole minutes on end doing nothing but gyrating on the stage and shouting to the women in the crowd asking who wanted to sleep with him that night. It was really intense. There was a girl next to Ariel who was all dolled up and looked like she was only thirteen years old. Then we saw that she had a boyfriend with her.

Afterwards, Ariel and I went outside to continue registering voters. Many of the people we asked were only fourteen or fifteen- we felt like we looked younger than these kids. All the women were really decked out- in color matching outfits with high heels. Jeremy and Ann came and picked us up and we went home to discuss our victories and oddly wonderful night. Going to an R-Kelly concert with Ariel is one of the greatest things I have ever done. Dancing and staring at each other in our pink boas and codepink shirts, surrounded by a sea of people who were clearly way more in the know than we were, and grinning from ear to ear. Good times, good times. Getting out the vote may be hard work, but it’s hard fun, too…!