Happy Birthday Carol!

September 22, 2011



Eliza, Carol & Sheila



Kathy


Happy Birthday Carol!

Living in Key West, you tend to meet a lot of people, at least I do. It is a very transient community with people always coming and going and a constant flow of tourists or friends and family of friends who live here visiting all the time. It can sometimes make it difficult to maintain long term friendships as the community of people who live here and have been here for all or most of the twenty years that we have lived here is really not all that big.

Fiona & Liz



Britanni

Our friend Carol is one of those people who I have known for many, many years. She is one of those people who become part of the fabric of your life and you just expect them to be there, not really considering the positive impact that they have had. Not that she has not had her fair share of coming and going, but she always returns and is one of the people who make Key West such an amazing place to live.

Beth & Anna

Rob & Carol

Bethany, Yajarira & Kathy

So it was indeed a special occasion to be invited to join Carol for her birthday spectacular dress-up bar stroll bike ride. Coming pretty much straight from the Mel Fisher symposium, I did not really have the opportunity to don a costume and I felt pretty out of place when we all gathered at Don’s place to begin the party, but everyone was fairly understanding. The idea was to recycle old Fantasy Fest costumes and we have yet to get ours out of storage yet, though the time is indeed drawing near.





Bethany, Eliza, Kathy, Beth, Carol & Anna

The party was stellar. Almost everyone was dressed in some sort of costume and it was fun indeed riding from bar to bar (with one stop at our friend Sheila’s house for jello shots). It got especially interesting once we hit downtown where thousands of bikers were mingling and had no real idea of what to make of the crowd of costumed revelers. Just another day in Key West.

Carol, Brittani & Eliza

Kathy & Jim



Kathy & I stayed with the group, which had people joining up and dropping out as their schedules allowed during the six hour schedule, for about four hours. Our stops included the Green Parrot and Jack Flatt’s and we dropped out as they were headed to the Smoking Tuna. We had a conflict as we were planning to attend the biker Burlesque show at the Schooner Wharf Bar. It was a great time though and we would have loved to go the distance. We heard good reports from later in the evening and completely missed many who were there just for the later portion. Happy Birthday Carol.

Fiona

Hilary & Carol

Anna, Beth & Sheila

After a quick pit stop at the Porch, we left the throngs on Duval and headed over for the 6 PM Burlesque Show in honor of the Poker Run. The Key West Hot Heels Burlesque Bash was a quick little show produced by Cowboy Marky of Key West Burlesque and featuring a few of their performers putting on a fantastic little show that gave the bikers and bar denizens a small taste of what locals have come to expect from the fantastic Burlesque troupe.





Erin

The show featured all the sexy fun and singing that comes in the full shows with a few twists thrown in to appeal to the biker crowd including the installation of a pole for some amazing demonstrations of pole dancing. Once again it was an incredible show, sexy without being raunchy and the crowd responded well, slightly more reserved and respectful than I might have guessed.

Joanna

Frenchie



After the awesome show, we had a quick meal at Harpoon Harry’s then closed out the night and a long thirteen hour day out at Finnegan’s Wake listening to some awesome Irish music and kicking back with friends. A pretty much perfect Key West day!

Tradesman Day & Poker Run

September 21, 2011









Tradesman Day & Poker Run

Fourteen years ago in 1994, The Green Parrot Bar celebrated the installation of a permanent sculpture by Key West artist John Martini that still graces the bar and is known today more as simply the Tradesman sculpture rather than its full name, “Where’s Jimbo and Other Giants of the Building Trade”. Every year since, the bar has hosted an annual event known as Tradesmen’s Day to honor the sculpture and the hard working men and women of Key West. Drink specials, bargain priced t-shirts and souvenirs and a large collection of all manner of tradespeople from the motley to the snazzy are all hallmarks of this event.



John & Buco



In the past few years the event has added the element of a fundraiser for the Fantasy Fest King & Queen candidates who are raising money for AIDS Help as part of the competition leading to the coronation next month. This combination has added more people and a silly and diverse element to the event.









Each year, attendees can get an official Trademen ID card that is good for nothing, but is a fun collectible. I have a number of them, having been a semi-regular attendee for the past fourteen years. I even caught a glimpse of my much younger self in the video they had playing from the first one back in 1994.









The event happened to coincide this year with the first evening of the annual Poker Run motorcycle gathering that is celebrating its thirty-eighth straight year of packing the island with cycles and riders, closing Duval Street to all but motorcycle traffic and bringing around 10,000 bikers to the island for a loud, but much needed cash infusion into the island economy.







I have always enjoyed Bike Week as it is known locally, though it is pretty much concentrated to the weekend. The noise can be annoying, but it is over fairly quickly and comes as part of the price we all pay when we choose to live in a tourist destination.



Bruce, Corey & Howard



Saturday morning, I joined my buddy Bruce for breakfast at Pepe’s before we headed over to the Westin Resort to attend the first Florida Keys Maritime Heritage Symposium sponsored by the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum, the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and FKCC. The half day symposium featured presentations about shipwrecks, lighthouses and other cultural marine resources and was very interesting. Part of the presentation was about finding the slaveship Guerrero in Key Largo a project that Bruce worked on during his days at RPM Nautical.

Shawna

Jim



The afternoon was spent back on Duval street checking out the many amazing bikes and the crowds that were there for the Poker Run. My friends Jim & Shawna were MCing the blindfolded trike race that was being held on the street outside of Sloppy Joe’s. The trike race involved two person teams, one blindfolded and riding the trike the other trying to guide them using voice commands only through an obstacle course. It was very amusing.