CHUGTAG FLUGTAG
July 24th, 2008 by alfie in From the Street“What makes you qualified to lead a street team?” asked Steve at Yeoman’s Road Pub on Thursday — the site of this month’s Beer Club.
“Um,” I said, sipping my beer. “I drink a lot?”
“That seems to be a reoccurring trend with Creative Loafing.”
Alright, so maybe CL was sponsoring the Craft Beer Expo on Saturday, starting a new wine club and gearing up for our annual Beer Fest, but it couldn’t be such a bad thing for a company to be synonymous with drinking.
“When I’m bartending, I remember most of my customers by what they drink, not their name,” said Crystal, one of the volunteers pouring Michelob’s Porter, Fire Rock Pale Ale, Longboard Island Lager and Longhammer IPA at Beer Club.
Apparently my name was also becoming associated with drinking, as more than a few beer club members told the pourers that I said they could have extra drinks. CL’s staff writer, Wade Tatangelo tried this tactic but quickly reverted to swindling free drinks by using his standard go-to line, “I write Bar Tab.” This was the kind of fringe benefit I have always craved as a writer. Like a food critic getting free meals or a travel writer getting free vacations, I want to be admitted into various forums where women appear nude in groups by simply saying, “It’s alright. I’m doing research for my novel, Panty Raid.”
The beer club meeting doubled as the launch party for CLs Flugtag team, The Breadwinners, and the night was graced (however briefly) by another company closely associated with drinking — Red Bull. At around 8 p.m., a fleet of tiny silver, blue and red cars blocked Davis Boulevard and out poured a slew of girls with backpacks (full of complimentary Red Bull) sporting tube socks and ass shorts they had obviously received training on wearing. As much as I hate to admit it, Red Bull is the leader in guerilla marketing. As street team manager, I have toyed with the idea of adopting Red Bull’s marketing strategy, simply escorting a flamboyant car full of pretty girls around town. To be fair, Red Bull’s genius goes far beyond beautiful promo girls. Consider Flugtag: an event that bears the company’s logo on every major television station and newspaper, including viral internet videos, without paying a cent for ad space.
In German, Flugtag means “plane day,” but in America, it stands for something much more. America, the birthplace of flight, was founded by people willing to risk everything by voyaging on unsound vessels over hazardous waters. As a result, the country is a breeding ground for people wild enough to launch themselves over a 30-foot drop in homemade, manpowered machines. But flight is only one aspect of Flugtag. Mainly it is about the glory of having your spectacular crash, or death, memorialized on blooper reels.
On Saturday morning, outside the Tampa Convention Center, contestants literally signed their lives away, yet none seemed worried about the prospect of crashing into the polluted bay crowded with watercrafts and submerged wreckage. They all believed they would fly safely to the other side. This is what makes America great. There’s never a shortage of people willing to believe in, and celebrate, absurdity. And nothing is more absurd than a parade of citizens, dressed up in every deviation of maniac-chic gear, destroying their floats by launching them off a ledge.
I prepared for the day by chugging half a flask of raspberry Vodka that had been warming in my car since the night before. I wiped up the spillage with an American flag neck-scarf then sprinted a mile and a half in my patented, jewel-encrusted flight suit with a CL cape flapping behind. When I reached the event, I had sweat out all my breakfast vodka and was on the verge of vomiting, buy luckily CL videographer Zach was waiting for me with a bottle of water and a microphone and we got started.
“I think this might be the one time you’re out-dressed,” Zach said, referring to all the outlandishly decorated flight teams and what we thought was a Furries support-group meeting inside the convention center. It turned out that Tampa’s annual Metrocon Convention (a sci-fi/anime tradeshow) was taking place at the same time. (Furries are people who dress up in animal suits and have sex with each other.)
The Austrians hold the Flugtag flight record at 195 feet, but I feel confident that Americans hold the record from the number of people ready to stand up and say, “Yes I will jump off a bridge if all my friends do it. Just give me some sort of spandex costume and an unsound structure to sit in.”
I began asking some of the waiting crews if anyone needed me to step in as pilot, but no one was intimidated by the repeated splashdowns. “We’ve watched a few episodes of Dancing with the Stars, so we’re ready to rock,” said the team captain of the Thunder Bees, demonstrating a few moves of his choreographed flight-dance while wearing a skin-tight black suit and a gold thong.
Party Fowl trained for the event the same way they came up with the idea for trying to fly a giant keg — by sitting around drinking. After all it was at such a time, with minds heightened by drink that they realized: an empty keg floats.
CL’s “Breadwinner” design consisted of an expertly engineered cart built from two-by-fours and papier-mâché. Atop the cart sat a giant deflated Cuban sandwich, in which the pilot, CL’s office manager London, was pressed inside as the cheese. The plan was to have the Cuban go down as a submarine, while the cheese floated above on a hang glider made from PVC piping and trash-bag-plastic.
“Do you have any last words?” I asked team captain, Chris Madalena.
“How can we be expected to fly without alcohol? They keep giving us Red Bulls, but what good are they without vodka?”
I too was a bit distressed about having to mix the two drinks a good half-hour apart.
Despite the lack of alcohol, the team still managed to fly a respectable 30 feet. Unfortunately, the majority of that distance was straight down. I suppose in a company known for drinking, it’s not how high our team ranked in the competition that matters but how much we drank afterwards in celebration that counts. We’re still waiting for our gold medal on that one.
E-mail Alfie at shawn.alff@creativeloafing.com
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