Tampa Bay Street Team

“You here for the mud wrestling?” the shuttle driver asked.

“Mud wrestling?” I repeated, weighing the box of promo gear I was to handout at a wine tasting against my primal need to watch naked women squabble in mud.

“Just get in,” The driver said, and I did. It turned out he was just screwing with my emotions. There were no kiddie pools filled with mud or women to wrestle in them at the Don CeSar. There was, however, a model in pasties being painted with a scene of the wine country, but I was assured that she didn’t take tips nor would she wrestle another girl covered in paint.

The Tampa Bay Wine & Food Festival proved to be three full days of high class debauchery. Saturday, The Don CeSar hosted a Grand Tasting Village on the beach beneath a tent large enough to house a royal wedding. The place was consumed with the kind of people you’d find having fun in travel magazines, wearing sunglasses in the shade, floppy straw hats, sun dresses, khakis, polo shirts and white linen pants.

Not only did the soft white sand provide a cool ambiance, it also acted as a landing pad for anyone who had too much wine and for the hordes of high-end gals I couldn’t afford who stepped into the event wearing heels. From behind, these perfectly tanned 40something cougars looked 20. A few looked just as young from the front with mask-sized sunglasses and distracting boob jobs. There were also plenty of younger women with professional sales jobs — wild girls all grown up but who still bore the smudged party-girl tattoos of their college years.

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Creative Loafing’s staff celebrated the weekend early on Wednesday at Gators on Treasure Island. We had just finished our much anticipated Summer Guide issue and the staff had plenty of reasons to party. We munched on vats of hot wings, trays of mini Cubans, and fish spread (whatever that means). I attempted to rally the scattering of patrons and tourists eating on the deck to join us by offering them free Frisbees, but most gave lame excuses like, “I have to work in the morning,” or “I don’t do parties.” Luckily for the CL staff, we were drinking with our boss, which meant the more beers we bought her, the later we could come to work the next day. But even if our publisher wasn’t there, I couldn’t imagine a better way to spend a Wednesday night, eating fried food, drinking beer, watching the sun sink into the water and, if you’re like me, hiding behind giant sunglasses to stare at the legs of the waitstaff who scampered about in short-shorts.

The next night, we were back at Crowbar in Ybor City.

“This is not your normal hip-hop crowd,” Crowbar’s doorman Wolf told a white-collar security guard Thursday. “It’s going to be a nice, relaxed night. These kids came to hear some intelligent shit that flows nice.”

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Preventing waste was a major theme at the Pinellas Living Green Expo, held last Saturday and Sunday at the Harborview Center in downtown Clearwater. Many of the vendors featured home construction materials that reduce energy waste: thicker windows, foam insulation and low-flow toilets. The current dilemma with going green is that one must purchase more products to be green, and in doing so, generate more waste. This is just a consequence of the movement, being relatively new, and one that is still something of a status symbol for those who can afford to buy hybrids or to build new “green” houses. With this said, I was surprised that the majority of expo attendants were regular folks looking for tricks to save money on their energy bills. There were a few hardcore idealists of the dreadlocked and patchouli variety, aging hippies with gray pony tails, and yuppies uniformed in bicycling spandex, helmets, sunglasses and fanny packs, but they were the minority.

  

One major exception to this good natured crowd were the prize-whoring elderly, dead set on loading free garb in their complementary cloth, grocery sacks. Those who were less agile (or couldn’t simply swipe promo items and run) delivered long oratories about how they loved CL (mostly because it is free) as their justification for leaving the booth with five promotional ball point pens. At times I felt like I was in a Charlie Brown comic strip, sitting at a booth labeled, “the doctor is in.” More than a few told me dramatic sob stories before explaining why they needed an entire stack of temporary tattoos. I tried to scare them away with CL’s latest cover, featuring a pair of pink bumper-balls hanging below a license plate that read “Nutz 2 U,” but they were too blinded by the promise of prizes to be swayed by nuts.

“I need four because I have four grandchildren,” a granny in an electric scooter told me as she took four miniature beer mugs from my table.

Did she even have grandchildren? Would she use the mugs to sort her collection of sugar packets from various fast food joints despite the fact that she’s diabetic? I can’t begin to fathom how excited her grandchildren will be next Christmas when they get matching miniature beer mugs from Grandma. What kills me is that these prize-whores horde promo items like treasure, with the intent of passing it on to their relatives. The reality is that when these pack rats keel over, their heirs will just throw away all the coffee cans full of free pencils and drawers full of stress balls. Perhaps some sort of entrance fee, say the price of bus fare or a pint of blood, would discourage these prize hunters. Or perhaps next year I could set up a booth on how to keep your grandparents from collecting promo garb like Halloween candy. Maybe I’ll give away handcuffs or tazers.

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