Sunday, November 2, 2008

Carnival's Donkey Dick Tease

Carnival Cruise Line hijacked my dream and created a six story tall pinata filled with 8000 pounds of candy in South Philly in attempt to break a Guinness World Record for the World’s Largest Pinata on November 2...and they invited Philly to participate. Surely, nothing could go wrong with this idea!

My original thoughts were of trampled masses in a mad rush for candy, and I'm sure the organizers had the same thought, too. That's probably why they only let a few hundred (not official numbers) in to the fenced off parking lot at the corner of Broad and Washington to stand directly around the pinata for a chance to be in their promotional commercial shoot.
And then they let in a larger group of people (I was part of this crowd), telling them to stand behind orange cones at the far end of the parking lot. They then shut the gates to the parking lot and kept the rest of the people street side gazing through the chain link fence at the spectacle to come. To placate all us people standing afar, they had already set out boxes of candy for us to eat while waiting. What they hadn't thought about was that the people of Philly (and I mean people, in general) are assholes who disregard instructions and like to fuck things up (they must have missed the Phillies celebration just a few days earlier). The poor people who were trying to coordinate this whole stunt were understaffed, unprepared, and had absolutely no air of authority. I did feel bad for the people trying to get the mob in line, but, really, what were they thinking?The mob was asked not to throw candy (it feels like rocks up side the head), and returned the favor by pelting the organizers (yeah, I giggled, and the pelted organizer giggled, too). One of the many large industrial hampers filled with candy was mobbed when an organizer turned and walked away. The organizers reacted well to all of these shenanigans by just letting the crowd have the candy in the hampers ahead of time. Then a rogue group bum rushed the crowd surrounding the pinata and everyone followed (myself included) because we had no idea if we were told to join the privileged group closer to the pinata, or not. There were no instructions as to how this whole event was going to play out. That's when they called the cops in to restore order and force everyone away from the pinata. Why the police weren't there in a show of force in the first place, I don't know? We all milled around for a long while waiting for this damn pinata to get smashed, but then were told to go home, and the pinata was not going to be broken because of "technical difficulties." I think they meant to say very poor planning on their part. There was no way they were going to be able to smash this thing safely with a non-compliant crowd.

As we were leaving, it looked as if the mob wanted a piece of the pinata, and the cops were called in again.

I have no idea if or when it's going to actually go down (maybe they did it after everyone left?), but I had already had enough long before they called it off, so won't be returning to see dreams come true or records broken if it is rescheduled.

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