saturday night on Pacific Avenue means it gets crowded and restaurants are full. we put our names on the waiting list of the Thai place, and stroll down the street as we’re waiting for our table. that’s how we stroll into a Santa Cruz Reclaim the Streets March. from Pacific Avenue to the clock tower at the intersection with Mission Street, which is where it really becomes apparent how the carpeople don’t like their traffic flow to be disturbed. but wait a minute, it is actually not very much disturbed. the crowd gathers around the clock-tower, where people dance to the sound system or burn an american flag on the police car. admittingly both things can be very fun, and in this era of war burning the U.S. flag provides a nice spectacle, and then what do you do saturday night in a small town, but frankly the sense escapes me a bit. is this a reclaiming the streets action or a playing war with the cops game? sure, the small thrills of annoying the cops are a familiar and well-rehearsed part of leftie culture. but i’m not impressed, especially not in this place where i’m mostly angry at the lack of political awareness and mobilization.
so i begin dancing in the middle of what is basically Highway One intersecting with down town Santa Cruz’ main street. a bit scary, but slowly (believe me, it seemed very slowly from the middle of the intersection location…) some people join the dance. but cars are aggressive and make people very reluctant to actually occupy the intersection. i’m getting really annoyed with the honking SUV’s, don’t feel like dancing anymore, and just sit down in the middle of the intersection. this attracks a small crowd around me, taking pictures and doing interviews. and women from the Dyke March who very friendly, addressing me as “sister”, ask me to leave the intersection.
the thing is… two marches kind of bumped into each other in Pacific Avenue and decided to join hands and march together for, well, everything. sexual diversity and taking back the streets. but the Dyke March had a permit, which Reclaim the Streets didn’t seek or have. so at the moment of arriving at the clock tower, the Dyke March people needed to have the small crowd off the intersection as fast as they could, while that wasn’t really part of the RTS people’s idea, but then again their ideas weren’t well articulated in any case. (check out the indymedia audio reportage if you want a sense of how the small bunch of people came on the street to have some fun, without much of a vision.)
i ended up doing this spontaneous one woman’s action that didn’t connect well with neither RTS nor the Dyke march (and in case you’re wondering, of course i left the intersection when my sisters of the Dyke March asked me to do so.), and that i didn’t manage to explain very well cause honestly i was a bit shaky in the middle of the intersection with the angry cars around me. but for some reason it did make me feel better, ventilate a bit of the anger against this place. so then we strolled back on Pacific Avenue and had nice Thai food. so far our saturday night adventures in small town Santa Cruz.