It's Pittsburgh Pride weekend this weekend, which is basically a giant street festival in downtown Pittsburgh celebrating and raising awareness of the LGBT community (that's lesbian, gay, bi and transgender for the layman). Officially, "Pride is a celebration of diversity in the Pittsburgh region … a celebration of who we are, where we have been and, most importantly, where we are going," according to pittsburghpride.org.
From what I hear, 35,000 people showed up for this party last year. This year, they expect about 40,000. It's HUGE. I will be one of those 40,000 people going this year. And not only am I going, but I'm going as a VIP. BOOYA suckers. And I'm not even lesbian, gay, bi or transgender! It's just because I'm such a stellar straight person. Or, one could argue, it's because I got lucky.
As I've already mentioned, my employer is a corporate sponsor for Pride Pittsburgh, and so me and my coworker and friend Yvonne signed up to walk in the Pride March on Sunday afternoon (it's an LGBT awareness parade) which made us eligible for a company raffle to win tickets to the VIP lounge at Pride fest on Saturday night (tonight).
Tickets for this lounge thing cost $300 ($200 is donated to the foundation that puts Pride fest together), and you get your own special entrance to the event, food, adult beverages and and and! priority seating for the Patti Labelle concert! GAH!
And guess who won two tickets to the VIP lounge in the raffle. I already gave it away - it was totally me. I have been listening to Lady Marmalade all morning.
But that was all I knew about Patti Labelle. So I did some Googling, and turns out, I'm not actually a big Patti Labelle fan. Well, no, that's not what I mean. Here's what I mean: she has great songs and she's immensely talented and apparently a great business woman too because she also has this whole line of spices and also online videos on how to make various foodstuffs. But I only watched the video about mac and cheese. She scared me. She struck me as... I don't know.... mean or something. I can't explain it. I just know that if I was cooking with her, she would have chewed me up and spit me out because I would have not been able to do anything right for her, no matter what. I was intimidated by her. Despite the fact that she was wearing a black tutu while she made her mac and cheese.
But I'm really curious to see her perform live tonight. She's pretty much a living legend, and I just wonder: will it live up to the hype?
Either way, I have a lot of respect for the woman, and not only because there is a small part of me that fears she will somehow find this on the intrawebs and have me destroyed. But because, if I was 67, I'd be in bed and sleeping before her show would even start.
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