My eight best girlfriends from Richmond who receive my Sunday briefings about my weekend know that for this summer (more than any other summer, or any other time of my life, for that matter), I am in the business of having adventures. A couple of nights a week, accompanied by whoever is brave enough to join us, Kelsey and I go out into the world and wreak havoc in the best kind of way. Not that you couldn’t figure it out for yourself, but for us, having adventures means befriending the most interesting strangers, dancing in the most ridiculous ways, participating in the most absurd activities (for instance, going to see an improv show, befriending the troupe, and being invited to take classes…as a pregame), and generally ending the night with a story worthy of an epic email to our best friends. Now, for the sake of my future political career and my mother’s opinion of me, I will not be detailing each of our adventures on this blog. I will, however, be sharing those that I deem appropriate. This Sunday morning’s adventures are officially bloggable.
After a night out downtown with Kelsey (sensing a pattern here?) and her best friend from school, Sarah, Kelsey’s brother kindly offered to drive us back to our car, which was responsibly parked at a garage downtown and not driven that night. When Kelsey’s brother let us out onto the street where we were parked, we noticed that the entire block was taped off with the yellow crime scene tape and that there were a couple of cops standing guard. What does a true adventurer do in such a situation? Befriend the cops and talk to them for upwards of 30 minutes, of course.
We walk up to “Officer Adams” and “Tom” and jokingly ask, “Oooh, was there a murder??” With straight faces, they tell us that yes, yes there was a murder. Oh. We naturally ask for details, and they don’t tell us a lot, but we do learn that the incident occurred after the bars let out at 2 a.m., and the cops ultimately had to shoot and kill a gang member involved in the scuffle. This scares us a little, considering that the bar we had gone to the night before (and our favorite bar in downtown Denver) is only one block west of the scene. But enough about that…back to the adventure.
We do all the normal things that you do when you are befriending a police officer: share our gum with them; ask them about their wives and girlfriends; have them point out every item on their cops belts; have them pretend to handcuff us; get Tom to do Cry Face (see Hump Day Cry Face tomorrow for evidence); convince them to let us dance in the street as a way of directing traffic; and invite them to Kelsey’s graduation party later that day. (For the record, much to our disappointment, they didn’t come.)
After we’d exhausted all of the typical cop conversation topics, we noticed a reporter walking toward the scene of the crime. We said goodbye to Officer Adams and Tom and rushed over to this reporter, “Mary” (how does the whole privacy protecting of names work with blogs, anyway?). We muttered some nonsense about loving journalism and asked if we could shadow her while she walked around. She gave us the once-over, chuckled and said, “Out all night?” and allowed us to shadow her. Now, while we were incredibly interested in/freaked-out by the scene that lay before us, Mary actually seemed pretty bored. She was casually jotting down notes and pointing some things out to us while we ooh-ed and aah-ed and asked questions like a bunch of budding forensic scientists. She interviewed us for a dry article that was posted online and appears to have already been taken down. Then we found the photographer and followed him around, taking important pictures like zoom-ins of the little yellow evidence markers with our half broken digital cameras (pictures that we will no doubt put in our portfolios when we apply to the FBI).
By this time, we were bored, hungry, and had learned all there is to know about reporting on a murder, so we drove home, screaming “Happy Sunday!!!” to all of the gay couples headed to the gay pride parade taking place downtown. We had a breakfast appetizer of Smartfood, then shared some delicious French toast with Kelsey’s family. Just a normal little Sunday morning, eh?
[Posted by Mallory]
six words to change the world. 