MILEAGE MAY VARY // Betsy Housten
To convert, outfit, and equip a standard yellow school bus to a fully-operational tour vehicle that runs on vegetable oil, and is capable of transporting a 30-piece radical marching band and dance troupe for 15 days across eight states for a total of 2700 miles, there are a lot of things you need to do. Some of them will fall apart at the last minute; others will come together in ways you could never have anticipated.
This is all part of the magic.
The Rude Mechanical Orchestra was founded in April 2004, when a handful of New York City musicians assembled an ad hoc, activist-oriented marching band to bring to the pro-choice March for Women's Lives in Washington, D.C. Their idea was simple: political demonstrations worked best when infused with energy, which meant music, and they wanted to provide that music. After the march, they realized they'd hit on something both useful and exhilarating. 15 years later, the band is still going strong.
I first encountered the RMO in August of that year, at the protests against the Republican National Convention, which was taking place in New York. After one term in office – during which his administration bombed Afghanistan, invaded Iraq (again), signed a bill prohibiting late-term abortions, and manipulated the traumatic events of September 11th to justify increased domestic surveillance and mass detentions of immigrants – President George W. Bush was running for re-election. The city was pissed; New Yorkers, not having it, planned five days of demonstrations in response.
Throughout the week, almost two thousand arrests were made, many of which were later found in a series of class-action lawsuits to be unconstitutional. The Sunday of the convention, I watched a group of musicians occupying the sidewalk outside the jail on Centre Street, playing instruments and leading a crowd in chants while people who'd been arrested were released. I remember feeling awed and inspired by their fierce yet celebratory presence. Later, I found out the name of this group: the RMO.
Two days prior, I'd also been arrested, pulled off my bicycle during the city's Critical Mass bike ride, in which a group of cyclists flooded the streets of Manhattan the last Friday night of every month. We'd stop cars at each intersection, often dressed in costume, until everyone had gone past. It was minimally disruptive, a fun and non-violent way to celebrate bike culture and promote environmentally-friendly methods of transport. That month's ride coincided with the timing of the RNC, so it became part of the protests. The crossover was natural.
The NYPD had a field day, smashing signs, impounding bikes, shackling people with plastic Flexi-Cuffs and herding them into a fleet of paddy wagons. I remember my cell phone ringing in the pocket of my messenger bag, hands tightly cuffed behind my back, knowing it was my out-of-town boyfriend calling to see where I was, knowing there was no way I could answer it. I spent the first half of that night with a few dozen other activists in an oily-floored former bus garage near the Chelsea Piers, and the remainder of the night in the downtown jail nicknamed The Catacombs. I got out the next morning with a slap on the wrist, physically intact but psychically twitching.
Spending a night in jail is dehumanizing, even if nothing exceptionally terrible happens while you are there. We went in and out of so many cages, chained together like a line of delinquent ducklings, posing for photographs and pressing our fingertips to screens. No one would tell us what was happening, what we'd been charged with, when we could make our phone call or appear before a judge. Then suddenly, 14 hours after I was plucked from the intersection of 35th and 7th, I was ushered into a courtroom where I signed a document that mandated I stay out of trouble for six months, then walked out into the late morning Lower Manhattan sunshine, blinking and befuddled.
No part of that experience made me regret taking part in the protest; if anything, my night in jail intensified my distrust of police, and increased my desire to keep speaking out against things I thought were wrong.
I joined the RMO in January 2005, after seeing them a few more times around town, always in the middle of some kind of march, playing and dancing and energizing the people around them. I hadn't known I was missing them until they came crashing into my life, and I realized that their particular blend of sparkle, brass, and activism was the perfect way to express my enduring love of social justice and marching band. In high school I'd played an alto saxophone on loan from the music department, but I was never much good. From my recent years banging on empty paint buckets at other protests against the war in Iraq, I knew I had a reasonable sense of rhythm and I suspected a snare drum might be a better instrument for me, but I didn't own one of those either.
A friend of mine gave me the number of one of RMO's co-founders, a friendly woman named Sarah who said over the phone that my lack of instrument was not a problem. She told me I was welcome to check out their weekly Tuesday practice, and that if I decided to join, they'd try to rustle up a drum for me to play.
The RMO rehearsed in the basement of a musty building on Jay Street, halfway between the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn waterfront. I followed Sarah's directions from the subway station, through an unmarked brick-red door, down a set of dimly-lit stairs, around a corner, through another door, and along an even dingier hallway. As I approached the first room on the right, my ears picked up the tumbling chaotic noise of musicians tuning, warming up on their brass and woodwinds and percussion. It was a welcoming, familiar sound. I pulled open the door and stepped into the room.
Warm yellow light enveloped me. Instrument cases, music stands, and six-packs of beer littered the black-and-white checkered floor. A piano leaned against the far wall. Over it hung a small black velvet painting of an iridescent unicorn cavorting in front of a rainbow. Ten or twelve faces looked over at me, curiously.
"Hi," I said, hovering around the doorway. "I'm Betsy. I... want to play drums?"
A seated woman with freckles and long strawberry-blond hair leaned out from behind an enormous bass drum. "I'm Sarah! Come in." She smiled widely, gesturing around her with a fuzzy mallet. "This is the band."
Three and a half years later, we went on our first tour.
By 2008, the members of the RMO (or RudeMos for short) had been lending musical accompaniment to rallies, marches, protests, demonstrations, picket lines, fundraisers, benefit shows, and block parties around New York City for four years – "serenading the rabble," to quote RMO's website. Our instrumentalists comprised some three dozen flutists, clarinetists, saxophonists, trombonists, trumpet players, tuba players, plus a percussion section of bass drums, snare drums, quads, and crash cymbals. Our repertoire included nearly 20 songs, featuring covers of pop, punk, reggae, gospel, klezmer, jazz, cumbia, Bollywood, Serbian folk, and Balkan brass tunes arranged by various RudeMos, plus a marching version of the anti-fascist hymn "Bella Ciao" and a few original compositions. Not everyone in the band identified as queer, but enough did – some opting to engage in multiple non-monogamous relationships within its ranks – that we sometimes referred to ourselves as the Big Gay Band.
Our troupe of dancers, known as Tactical Spectacle (or T-Spec), served many functions. In the streets, they directed the band with whistles and megaphones, flanked us on all sides to make sure no errant protesters or police intruded on our formation, and shouted chants during prescribed parts of songs to get the crowd going. During non-marching gigs, they performed choreographed dance and acrobatic routines, wearing t-shirts with letters spelling out messages like NO MORE WAR. Sparkly tutus and striped tights abounded, as did clothing in wild patterns, primarily in the band's colors of black and emerald green. We sewed handmade patches to our outfits, with rainbow suspenders, checkered miniskirts, and shiny hot pants thrown on for additional flair.
Anyone could propose a gig to us, an outside organization or one of our own members, as long as it fit with our mission statement to support and amplify social justice groups and causes. Operating on a consensus model, we decided which gigs to play and when by determining if a quorum of musicians were available, and if anyone had any strong objections to the event. The sheer size of our band meant not everyone had to play every gig; it also meant that meetings often ran long, and disagreements about political nuances of events and songs sometimes went on for hours. But at the end of the day, everyone who loved the project stuck around, and we kept moving forward.
I'd gotten a battered old snare drum from Jonathan, a baritone saxophonist who'd rescued it from the street years earlier, unearthing it from a pile of flotsam in the corner of his apartment to kindly donate to me. With the snare, I discovered the instrument I'd been meant to play my whole life. Learning to snap my sticks against the head of that drum gave me a rhythmic freedom and pure percussive delight I'd not yet known. I was a messy drummer at first, but I loved the hell out of it, practicing as often as I could and eventually upgrading to my very own brand-new snare. Banging out my part in glittery tights in a room full of people who believed in the same kinds of things I did made my soul sing, every time we played. I was sold. I'd follow this band anywhere.
At the time of our first tour, we didn't know that Barack Obama would soon be sworn in as our first Black president. What we did know was that John McCain (later joined by Sarah "Drill Baby Drill" Palin) was campaigning for the White House on another conservative platform. The US was still embroiled in its disastrous military occupation of Iraq, a deadlocked national debate about healthcare, and the worst domestic financial crisis in decades. There was no shortage of issues to take to the streets about. I don't remember which RudeMo suggested traveling to the protests against the Republican National Convention taking place in St Paul that September, but once the idea was introduced, many of us felt the itch to take our show on the road.
The converted school bus was the brainchild of Megan, a trumpet player who lived in a tiny houseboat on the Gowanus Canal. "I always wanted to drive around a school bus," she explained when I asked. For Megan, growing up in Pennsylvania, and waiting in the cold for the bus every morning before school, the daily appearance of the "great yellow savior" would forever be associated with joy and the promise of imminent warmth. "I hadn't previously had a good reason to buy a school bus," she told me, "and then... RMO! It seemed like the only logical way to take a tour."
After months of discussing, brainstorming, fundraising, and planning, the RMO purchased a 1990 Ford AmTram for $4,000 from a guy named Greg who ran a business selling decommissioned school buses. Greg drove the bus up from his home in Florida to New Jersey, where he met up with Megan and Sully, a member of T-Spec who would help Megan with much of the conversion process. Greg spent the morning showing them around the bus and teaching them how to drive it in an empty parking lot. After he left, Megan and Sully took a terrifying ride on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to get the bus home. They were so scared they spent the whole time harmonizing "Ring of Fire" over and over, until they pulled into Grand Army Plaza just as the rest of the band wrapped up a gig in the adjacent Prospect Park. When the bus stopped, the band cheered and ran aboard, tooting and trilling horns. I remember excitedly tapping my drumsticks on the outside of the bus, against the folding doors, along the backs of the seats.
The Big Gay Bus had arrived.
STEP ONE: TRANSFORM THE INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR
Remove the rows of institutional seating from the bus. You will need to make room for 30 people, their instruments and belongings, food, tools, emergency supplies, and a mobile restroom. Take five of these benches, cover them in stain-resistant vinyl, and re-install them at an increased height such that one regulation 18"x13"x11" milk crate of personal items per passenger will fit underneath. Face the first row forward. Organize the rest in an alternating fashion; face the second row backward, the third one forward, and so on. Don't worry about leg room. Everyone will soon become intimately acquainted with one another's knees.
To the back of the fifth row, attach two futon mattresses and one more bench seat to the top of an old Ping Pong table, and secure them to a stack of crates. This setup will serve two purposes. Below, it will provide storage for instruments, flags, megaphones, a camp stove, a mini-fridge, and marine-grade batteries by which to power the electrical strips taped to the floor. Above, it will create an elevated space on which passengers may recline. Don't worry about anyone hitting their head on the ceiling, or the security of the storage space. Everyone in the lounge will be laying down, whether they are engaging in an amorous embrace, snuggling in a platonic pile of limbs, or something in between. And the back door near the storage space will only fall open on a highway once or twice, but the bus will not be traveling fast enough for this to be a problem for long.
Above the seats, where the ceiling of the bus meets the right-hand wall, rig one additional structure made of wide mesh fabric the length of the bus. This will serve as overhead storage, ideal for books, iPods, snacks, and sleeping bags. Call this structure "the bra." Don't worry about the tautness of the fabric. It will stretch out in the first day, and graze the tops of everyone's heads for the entirety of the tour. No one will complain; this will be the most minor invasion of personal space anyone will endure, and most will barely notice it after a few hours.
Just behind the lounge, build a mobile restroom. Place a toilet seat over a bucket half-filled with sawdust for number twos, drill a urine diverter through the floor to the highway for number ones, and cover the back window with wrapping paper, ModPodge, and pinup images (Helen Mirren in a bikini, Michelle Obama in a pantsuit). Suspend floor-length curtains around the other three sides. Don't worry about offending smells emanating from the bathroom. The sawdust will absorb most of the odor, and Riley the anosmic alto saxophonist will find a bizarre kind of glee in emptying the bucket on a regular basis.
Hang yellow gingham curtains over the windows with hooks and wire. Sharpie a note that says CALL YOUR MOM and tape it to the list of emergency numbers above the driver's head. Write the name of RMO songs on long magnetic strips, so changing set lists may be arranged en route, and stick them to the ceiling. Remove the STOP sign. Paint the exterior of the bus black and emerald, highlighted with silver. Affix the words BIG GAY in giant white letters to the front display panel, followed by an exclamation point. Accomplish these tasks with the help of dozens of musicians, dancers, friends, partners, neighbors and community members, in a series of manic work parties at the boatyard on the Gowanus, where the bus will be parked until it departs for tour on a muggy Friday afternoon in August.
To convert, outfit, and equip a standard yellow school bus to a fully-operational tour vehicle that runs on vegetable oil, and is capable of transporting a 30-piece radical marching band and dance troupe for 15 days across eight states for a total of 2700 miles, there are a lot of things you need to do. Some of them will fall apart at the last minute; others will come together in ways you could never have anticipated.
This is all part of the magic.
The Rude Mechanical Orchestra was founded in April 2004, when a handful of New York City musicians assembled an ad hoc, activist-oriented marching band to bring to the pro-choice March for Women's Lives in Washington, D.C. Their idea was simple: political demonstrations worked best when infused with energy, which meant music, and they wanted to provide that music. After the march, they realized they'd hit on something both useful and exhilarating. 15 years later, the band is still going strong.
I first encountered the RMO in August of that year, at the protests against the Republican National Convention, which was taking place in New York. After one term in office – during which his administration bombed Afghanistan, invaded Iraq (again), signed a bill prohibiting late-term abortions, and manipulated the traumatic events of September 11th to justify increased domestic surveillance and mass detentions of immigrants – President George W. Bush was running for re-election. The city was pissed; New Yorkers, not having it, planned five days of demonstrations in response.
Throughout the week, almost two thousand arrests were made, many of which were later found in a series of class-action lawsuits to be unconstitutional. The Sunday of the convention, I watched a group of musicians occupying the sidewalk outside the jail on Centre Street, playing instruments and leading a crowd in chants while people who'd been arrested were released. I remember feeling awed and inspired by their fierce yet celebratory presence. Later, I found out the name of this group: the RMO.
Two days prior, I'd also been arrested, pulled off my bicycle during the city's Critical Mass bike ride, in which a group of cyclists flooded the streets of Manhattan the last Friday night of every month. We'd stop cars at each intersection, often dressed in costume, until everyone had gone past. It was minimally disruptive, a fun and non-violent way to celebrate bike culture and promote environmentally-friendly methods of transport. That month's ride coincided with the timing of the RNC, so it became part of the protests. The crossover was natural.
The NYPD had a field day, smashing signs, impounding bikes, shackling people with plastic Flexi-Cuffs and herding them into a fleet of paddy wagons. I remember my cell phone ringing in the pocket of my messenger bag, hands tightly cuffed behind my back, knowing it was my out-of-town boyfriend calling to see where I was, knowing there was no way I could answer it. I spent the first half of that night with a few dozen other activists in an oily-floored former bus garage near the Chelsea Piers, and the remainder of the night in the downtown jail nicknamed The Catacombs. I got out the next morning with a slap on the wrist, physically intact but psychically twitching.
Spending a night in jail is dehumanizing, even if nothing exceptionally terrible happens while you are there. We went in and out of so many cages, chained together like a line of delinquent ducklings, posing for photographs and pressing our fingertips to screens. No one would tell us what was happening, what we'd been charged with, when we could make our phone call or appear before a judge. Then suddenly, 14 hours after I was plucked from the intersection of 35th and 7th, I was ushered into a courtroom where I signed a document that mandated I stay out of trouble for six months, then walked out into the late morning Lower Manhattan sunshine, blinking and befuddled.
No part of that experience made me regret taking part in the protest; if anything, my night in jail intensified my distrust of police, and increased my desire to keep speaking out against things I thought were wrong.
I joined the RMO in January 2005, after seeing them a few more times around town, always in the middle of some kind of march, playing and dancing and energizing the people around them. I hadn't known I was missing them until they came crashing into my life, and I realized that their particular blend of sparkle, brass, and activism was the perfect way to express my enduring love of social justice and marching band. In high school I'd played an alto saxophone on loan from the music department, but I was never much good. From my recent years banging on empty paint buckets at other protests against the war in Iraq, I knew I had a reasonable sense of rhythm and I suspected a snare drum might be a better instrument for me, but I didn't own one of those either.
A friend of mine gave me the number of one of RMO's co-founders, a friendly woman named Sarah who said over the phone that my lack of instrument was not a problem. She told me I was welcome to check out their weekly Tuesday practice, and that if I decided to join, they'd try to rustle up a drum for me to play.
The RMO rehearsed in the basement of a musty building on Jay Street, halfway between the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn waterfront. I followed Sarah's directions from the subway station, through an unmarked brick-red door, down a set of dimly-lit stairs, around a corner, through another door, and along an even dingier hallway. As I approached the first room on the right, my ears picked up the tumbling chaotic noise of musicians tuning, warming up on their brass and woodwinds and percussion. It was a welcoming, familiar sound. I pulled open the door and stepped into the room.
Warm yellow light enveloped me. Instrument cases, music stands, and six-packs of beer littered the black-and-white checkered floor. A piano leaned against the far wall. Over it hung a small black velvet painting of an iridescent unicorn cavorting in front of a rainbow. Ten or twelve faces looked over at me, curiously.
"Hi," I said, hovering around the doorway. "I'm Betsy. I... want to play drums?"
A seated woman with freckles and long strawberry-blond hair leaned out from behind an enormous bass drum. "I'm Sarah! Come in." She smiled widely, gesturing around her with a fuzzy mallet. "This is the band."
Three and a half years later, we went on our first tour.
By 2008, the members of the RMO (or RudeMos for short) had been lending musical accompaniment to rallies, marches, protests, demonstrations, picket lines, fundraisers, benefit shows, and block parties around New York City for four years – "serenading the rabble," to quote RMO's website. Our instrumentalists comprised some three dozen flutists, clarinetists, saxophonists, trombonists, trumpet players, tuba players, plus a percussion section of bass drums, snare drums, quads, and crash cymbals. Our repertoire included nearly 20 songs, featuring covers of pop, punk, reggae, gospel, klezmer, jazz, cumbia, Bollywood, Serbian folk, and Balkan brass tunes arranged by various RudeMos, plus a marching version of the anti-fascist hymn "Bella Ciao" and a few original compositions. Not everyone in the band identified as queer, but enough did – some opting to engage in multiple non-monogamous relationships within its ranks – that we sometimes referred to ourselves as the Big Gay Band.
Our troupe of dancers, known as Tactical Spectacle (or T-Spec), served many functions. In the streets, they directed the band with whistles and megaphones, flanked us on all sides to make sure no errant protesters or police intruded on our formation, and shouted chants during prescribed parts of songs to get the crowd going. During non-marching gigs, they performed choreographed dance and acrobatic routines, wearing t-shirts with letters spelling out messages like NO MORE WAR. Sparkly tutus and striped tights abounded, as did clothing in wild patterns, primarily in the band's colors of black and emerald green. We sewed handmade patches to our outfits, with rainbow suspenders, checkered miniskirts, and shiny hot pants thrown on for additional flair.
Anyone could propose a gig to us, an outside organization or one of our own members, as long as it fit with our mission statement to support and amplify social justice groups and causes. Operating on a consensus model, we decided which gigs to play and when by determining if a quorum of musicians were available, and if anyone had any strong objections to the event. The sheer size of our band meant not everyone had to play every gig; it also meant that meetings often ran long, and disagreements about political nuances of events and songs sometimes went on for hours. But at the end of the day, everyone who loved the project stuck around, and we kept moving forward.
I'd gotten a battered old snare drum from Jonathan, a baritone saxophonist who'd rescued it from the street years earlier, unearthing it from a pile of flotsam in the corner of his apartment to kindly donate to me. With the snare, I discovered the instrument I'd been meant to play my whole life. Learning to snap my sticks against the head of that drum gave me a rhythmic freedom and pure percussive delight I'd not yet known. I was a messy drummer at first, but I loved the hell out of it, practicing as often as I could and eventually upgrading to my very own brand-new snare. Banging out my part in glittery tights in a room full of people who believed in the same kinds of things I did made my soul sing, every time we played. I was sold. I'd follow this band anywhere.
At the time of our first tour, we didn't know that Barack Obama would soon be sworn in as our first Black president. What we did know was that John McCain (later joined by Sarah "Drill Baby Drill" Palin) was campaigning for the White House on another conservative platform. The US was still embroiled in its disastrous military occupation of Iraq, a deadlocked national debate about healthcare, and the worst domestic financial crisis in decades. There was no shortage of issues to take to the streets about. I don't remember which RudeMo suggested traveling to the protests against the Republican National Convention taking place in St Paul that September, but once the idea was introduced, many of us felt the itch to take our show on the road.
The converted school bus was the brainchild of Megan, a trumpet player who lived in a tiny houseboat on the Gowanus Canal. "I always wanted to drive around a school bus," she explained when I asked. For Megan, growing up in Pennsylvania, and waiting in the cold for the bus every morning before school, the daily appearance of the "great yellow savior" would forever be associated with joy and the promise of imminent warmth. "I hadn't previously had a good reason to buy a school bus," she told me, "and then... RMO! It seemed like the only logical way to take a tour."
After months of discussing, brainstorming, fundraising, and planning, the RMO purchased a 1990 Ford AmTram for $4,000 from a guy named Greg who ran a business selling decommissioned school buses. Greg drove the bus up from his home in Florida to New Jersey, where he met up with Megan and Sully, a member of T-Spec who would help Megan with much of the conversion process. Greg spent the morning showing them around the bus and teaching them how to drive it in an empty parking lot. After he left, Megan and Sully took a terrifying ride on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to get the bus home. They were so scared they spent the whole time harmonizing "Ring of Fire" over and over, until they pulled into Grand Army Plaza just as the rest of the band wrapped up a gig in the adjacent Prospect Park. When the bus stopped, the band cheered and ran aboard, tooting and trilling horns. I remember excitedly tapping my drumsticks on the outside of the bus, against the folding doors, along the backs of the seats.
The Big Gay Bus had arrived.
STEP ONE: TRANSFORM THE INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR
Remove the rows of institutional seating from the bus. You will need to make room for 30 people, their instruments and belongings, food, tools, emergency supplies, and a mobile restroom. Take five of these benches, cover them in stain-resistant vinyl, and re-install them at an increased height such that one regulation 18"x13"x11" milk crate of personal items per passenger will fit underneath. Face the first row forward. Organize the rest in an alternating fashion; face the second row backward, the third one forward, and so on. Don't worry about leg room. Everyone will soon become intimately acquainted with one another's knees.
To the back of the fifth row, attach two futon mattresses and one more bench seat to the top of an old Ping Pong table, and secure them to a stack of crates. This setup will serve two purposes. Below, it will provide storage for instruments, flags, megaphones, a camp stove, a mini-fridge, and marine-grade batteries by which to power the electrical strips taped to the floor. Above, it will create an elevated space on which passengers may recline. Don't worry about anyone hitting their head on the ceiling, or the security of the storage space. Everyone in the lounge will be laying down, whether they are engaging in an amorous embrace, snuggling in a platonic pile of limbs, or something in between. And the back door near the storage space will only fall open on a highway once or twice, but the bus will not be traveling fast enough for this to be a problem for long.
Above the seats, where the ceiling of the bus meets the right-hand wall, rig one additional structure made of wide mesh fabric the length of the bus. This will serve as overhead storage, ideal for books, iPods, snacks, and sleeping bags. Call this structure "the bra." Don't worry about the tautness of the fabric. It will stretch out in the first day, and graze the tops of everyone's heads for the entirety of the tour. No one will complain; this will be the most minor invasion of personal space anyone will endure, and most will barely notice it after a few hours.
Just behind the lounge, build a mobile restroom. Place a toilet seat over a bucket half-filled with sawdust for number twos, drill a urine diverter through the floor to the highway for number ones, and cover the back window with wrapping paper, ModPodge, and pinup images (Helen Mirren in a bikini, Michelle Obama in a pantsuit). Suspend floor-length curtains around the other three sides. Don't worry about offending smells emanating from the bathroom. The sawdust will absorb most of the odor, and Riley the anosmic alto saxophonist will find a bizarre kind of glee in emptying the bucket on a regular basis.
Hang yellow gingham curtains over the windows with hooks and wire. Sharpie a note that says CALL YOUR MOM and tape it to the list of emergency numbers above the driver's head. Write the name of RMO songs on long magnetic strips, so changing set lists may be arranged en route, and stick them to the ceiling. Remove the STOP sign. Paint the exterior of the bus black and emerald, highlighted with silver. Affix the words BIG GAY in giant white letters to the front display panel, followed by an exclamation point. Accomplish these tasks with the help of dozens of musicians, dancers, friends, partners, neighbors and community members, in a series of manic work parties at the boatyard on the Gowanus, where the bus will be parked until it departs for tour on a muggy Friday afternoon in August.
In Philadelphia, the RMO played a fundraiser for the local chapter of a union rights organization called Jobs with Justice. In Pittsburgh, we headlined a benefit to send local activists to the Critical Resistance conference against the prison industrial complex. In Cleveland, overheated RudeMos were greeted by a man in a head-to-toe unicorn costume and his friends from the Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition, who handed us each a chilled, mint-scented hand towel with tongs as we disembarked; we blew horns and beat drums extra hard for their community festival. We played any city that would have us – Baltimore, Columbus, Yellow Springs, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis – raising money for causes, sleeping on floors and couches and rooftops and porches and yards, defending the bus from intoxicated locals who jumped on it in the middle of the night, and bringing the ruckus for every good fight we could find.
Before we left New York, each person had volunteered for the duty of either organizing a gig and housing in one of our cities, or co-captaining the activities of the day with one other person. Every morning we had a meeting at 9am, in which we confirmed the agenda for the day ahead and discussed anything that needed to be dealt with from the day before. Tasks such as food cooking, dishwashing, navigating the day's route from printed paper maps, and repacking the storage space under the lounge of the bus rotated among us. This was how an anti-authoritarian, consensus-based project such as ours planned to survive this ambitious undertaking.
We juggled, hula hooped, swam in lakes, did yoga in backyards, led sing-alongs in parks, ate breakfast in gardens and napped among solar panels. In Ohio, we posed for a group photo in front of a sign that said GAY STREET. In Maryland, Roger rollerbladed away from the rest area where we'd stopped for twenty minutes, returning with a box of donuts salvaged from a dumpster and a pair of black patent-leather high heels, origins unknown. In Wisconsin, we treated a group of bemused Midwesterners to a 30-piece a cappella rendition of half our repertoire. In Minnesota, we ran out of protein and had to make do with something called Cantaloupe Soup for dinner.
One night in Indianapolis, we had nowhere to sleep. The collective house where we'd planned to spend the night did not have enough beds and couches for our large group, and the floor was filthy. We'd just played a set in their backyard, as a thank you for the members of the house who'd agreed to host us for the night, only to be shut down by local cops before finishing our set. Trooping back into the house, sweaty and sore, we got another unpleasant surprise: our hosts had been less than forthright with us about how much space the house actually had to put us up. There was no way we were all going to fit, even if some of us spent the night on the bus, which slept eight at most, and poorly. After six days on the road, even the most punk-rock among us knew we had to come up with an alternate plan, and fast.
We discussed. Should we try to squat the abandoned house next door? Several people vehemently blocked this motion, invoking a previous decision we had made not to risk arrest before the RNC. Should some of us sleep in the yard? No, that was more concrete than grass, and littered with splintery bike ramps and broken beer bottles.
Meredith, ever the pragmatist, commandeered the house's only computer and commenced an internet search for nearby campgrounds.
"There's a KOA about five miles from here," she called over the clatter of plates and the slam of the screen door as people went in and out, helping themselves to the pot of vegan polenta on the stove. "It closes in an hour. Do we want to do that?"
One by one we all agreed, and filed back into the bus for the drive, setting up our tents and sleeping bags in the dark once we arrived.
The next morning, I awoke to the sun shining through my tent. I unzipped the flap, shook off the dew, and ventured outside. RudeMos were sleepily walking around in the grass, carrying travel mugs of coffee and bowls of instant oatmeal. Everyone's so cute today, I thought as I took a seat at the picnic table and handed my plate and cup to Hugh. He smiled as he doled me a serving, happy to for once prepare a meal that did not involve hard-boiling our never-ending supply of eggs. His hot pink rat-tail shone in the bright Indiana sun.
That day, our morning meeting took place on the campgrounds. We sat in a circle in the grass, debriefing what had gone right the previous day and what had gone wrong. We agreed that it was essential to confirm with our hosts before we arrived that there was indeed space for all of us to stay, indoors and out. We reviewed the three gigs we'd performed the day before, identifying flubbed musical cues and particularly transcendent solos. We checked on the status of the head injury sustained by a member of T-Spec from another dancer's flying limbs. We congratulated ourselves on making it this far.
It wasn't all learning and growing, though. Couples broke up on tour, friends fought, tensions sometimes flared. One RudeMo gave a tearful plea for just one day's reprieve from being asked any questions, even though he probably knew the answers. Another got so angry at a comment from someone with whom she was having emotional conflict that she flung her travel mug to the ground in the middle of our campground meeting and stalked off into a nearby cornfield. I followed a few paces behind and sat with her in one of the rows as she cried in frustration, stroking her arm and cracking quiet jokes until she laughed through her tears.
STEP TWO: CONVERT THE ENGINE
Establish a relationship with a local vocational program for Brooklyn teenagers. Strike a deal with the principal, in which you agree to teach a handful of music classes for the students that culminate in a show in a nearby park, in exchange for their mechanic converting the engine of your bus to run on vegetable oil. You will be able to get much of this oil for free from diners and Chinese restaurants, as they largely have no use for their massive quantities of leftover oil. Identify plenty of restaurants along your tour route that might be good sources of donated vegetable oil when you're on the road, or at least look the other way. Make some phone calls. Don't worry if they laugh at you, hang up on you, think you're weird, or expressly forbid you from entering their property. This will not be the last time any of this happens.
Buy a filtration pump kit that you can use to procure the vegetable oil from the back of restaurants, industrial trash cans, or wherever the oil you want to use is being stored. This will filter the oil three times and pump it into your gas tank, where it will then go through another filtration system in the newly-converted engine of the bus. Clean the engine filters every 200 miles; otherwise, you will not be able to travel faster than 20mph on any road, including five-lane interstate highways. After you break down on the side of the road at least once a day for the first four days of tour, realize this is not just a suggestion, but an absolute rule.
When the filter suddenly refuses to allow itself to be fully drained and de-mucked somewhere in Pennsylvania, collaboratively devise a solution to hang the entire filtration system from the roof of the bus, allowing gravity to do the emptying for you. Don't worry about being on time. You will never be on time. Even when the filter is clean, the limiter on the engine of the vehicle that spent its former life as a school bus for children will not allow it to go past 55mph. The breeze through the pretty yellow curtains is perfect at that speed; besides, when you finally arrive, everything will smell like French fries.
"Is this your black t-shirt?"
Molly stood in the vestibule of the bus and held up a fistful of dark cloth, gazing out at the group of us assembled on the pavement of a rest area parking lot.
After a moment, Abe mumbled, "That's mine." She tossed it to him. He shook it out a little, then draped it over his shoulder and turned his attention back to her.
Day eight. Illinois. Our morning Lost and Found session. Things were constantly going missing on the bus: clothing, food, journals, sunscreen, sewing kits, cell phones, glitter, drumsticks. So it made sense to have a daily effort to redistribute the belongings that got stuffed into seats and abandoned in the aisles. A few people gave it a go, but Molly was the funniest. Something about her monotone straight-faced delivery struck me as incomparably hilarious. Others seemed to feel the same way; as if elected by an unconscious unanimous vote, she began doing it every day.
"Is this your yogurt?" Brandishing a 32-ounce container of vanilla Dannon, Molly cracked the lid and made a face. "What the fuck is even in here."
Nobody stepped up. Mariah, standing next to me, raised an electronic megaphone and repeated the question. The sound came out in a clipped and nasal timbre, echoing off the asphalt. Still no one moved. Molly set the container down on the floor behind her, then picked up a pair of green and black striped knee socks.
"Are these your stripey socks?"
Commotion ensued. Several people began yelling at once. That was the trouble with outfitting a band of our size in two main colors; a lot of people had the same clothes. This particular pair of socks belonged to at least five of us. I knew where mine were – dirty in my laundry sack, I'd worn them just last night – but several other RudeMos were now jockeying for these. Eventually Bruno triumphed over the melee, his face shining with pride as he rolled the open ends of the socks together and stuffed them in a pocket.
Molly moved on, unruffled.
"Is this your lesbian fiction?" she deadpanned, dangling a copy of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit over her head. A chuckle floated through the group.
"Mine!" piped up Judy's high-pitched voice. She trotted to the front of the crowd, reaching up her hand to Molly, who bestowed the book upon her like a benevolent god. Judy turned around and clutched it to her chest, closing her eyes and smiling beatifically. My upper body pitched forward involuntarily until my head landed on Mariah's shoulder. I laughed, hard and deep from my gut.
STEP THREE: GET EVERYTHING ELSE IN ORDER
Now that you've finished equipping the bus with everything it needs, you'll need to register it as a mobile home. This will ensure that the vehicle is legal to operate on the road without obtaining a Commercial Drivers License, which is an expensive, time-consuming, and ultimately unnecessary process. During the pre-tour insurance inspection, slide the middle bench seats down until they can reasonably approximate a few makeshift beds. Point out to the inspector that, as per mobile home regulation, your vehicle contains a working source of electricity (the power strips run from the battery under the lounge), a kitchen (the camp stove and mini-fridge), a bathroom (no need to show them the pinups), no STOP sign, and no visible yellow paint. Don't worry about what will happen to the bus after tour is over. The band will make good use of it for three more years, after which it will go through several community organizations before it is finally sold to a farmer in upstate New York. A lot of people will be very grateful for your hard work.
Finally, find a volunteer driver. Make sure he has four things: a valid driver's license, a calm demeanor capable of piloting a temperamental school bus carrying 30 weirdos and all their stuff at varying speeds for long hours at a time, a cheerful presence with which to inquire "Can I get a big gay receipt?" of every toll booth operator he encounters, and the kind of steely nerve necessary to inform any marauding police officers that neither he, nor any of the passengers on the bus he is operating, will consent to a search. Bonus points for having an awesome name like Jimmy Appelhanz. Don't worry about him at all, because he is perfect and everyone will love him.
Ten days in, we reached St Paul. Many of us greeted the city with a mixture of relief and anxiety: relief to finally stay in one place for more than one night, anxiety as we approached the RNC protest. Reports from friends who'd been there a few days told us police were swarming the Twin Cities, stopping buses and ransacking their contents. We heard some vehicles had already been impounded and their passengers arrested after officers perceived their intent to participate in the demonstrations. I was not alone in my fervent distrust of cops, and this news made all of us even more nervous.
In the parking lot of a gas station the night before the convention, RMO's legal team was put to the test. We'd just finished playing a gig, and were heading back to the house of our host when a squad car pulled us over. Red and blue lights swirled in the rearview mirror and bounced off the windows, giving the interior of the bus an eerily candied appearance.
Silently, we waited for the cops to board. We'd been practicing for this for days, suspecting the pre-protest police presence might be intense, role playing trial runs of how we would all act if the bus got searched. My heart pulsed in my throat. Rebecca and Sal, our two resident law students, made their way to the front of the bus.
"Hi, how are you doing?" greeted Sal, deliberately pleasant and professional.
"You folks in from out of town?" asked one cop.
"Yes, we're from New York," responded Sal.
The other cop tried to peer around her. Rebecca stepped into his path, blocking his view of the rest of the bus.
"What are you doing in the Twin Cities?" continued the first cop.
"We're in a band. We're visiting some friends," said Rebecca, politely but firmly, with a hand on her hip and the faintest edge of challenge in her voice. I dare you to come on this bus right now, her inflection and body language seemed to be saying.
"There's a protest here tomorrow. Are you planning to be a part of that?" The first cop was not letting it go.
"No, we're not," said Sal.
"You mind if we come in and look around?" questioned the second cop.
"Actually, we do," said Rebecca. "We do not consent to a search of this vehicle."
The second cop looked at the first cop, then back at Sal and Rebecca. Appelhanz spoke up then, saying, "I'm gonna go ahead and not consent to a search either." A long moment passed, during which the officers appeared to recognize that they had no legal ground upon which to keep detaining us. With a grunt from one, and a perfunctory "Well, just stay out of trouble" from the other, they turned and stepped off the bus.
A cheer went up. Sal and Rebecca stared at each other, dazed. Suddenly everyone was jumping up at once, rushing to the front of the bus to hug them, colliding with one another in the aisle and laughing with a collective release of adrenalin and fear.
"RudeMo legal team!" yelled someone from behind me.
Sal grinned and threw her fist in the air. Rebecca just shook her head. Appelhanz started the engine, backed out of the parking lot, and pointed the bus toward the house.
The protest the next day was long, loud, exhausting, and exhilarating. Activists from all over the country filled the streets. Radical Cheerleaders and Raging Grannies danced around, shouting about economic injustice, environmental exploitation and the erosion of civil liberties. Riot police with full-body armor and polycarbonate shields faced off against chanting protesters, arresting the radical journalist Amy Goodman and two producers of her radio show Democracy Now!, among others.
National Lawyers Guild volunteers in neon yellow hats threaded through the crowd, handing out the number of the local Cold Snap Legal Collective, ready to document any police misconduct that went down. At some point Fox News tried to film us performing, so we blocked their video cameras with flags and tubas, incapacitating their boom mike with nonstop snare drum rolls so they couldn't use the footage for their right-wing propaganda channel. Continuing past a line of cops armed with rubber bullets and tear gas, we gripped our instruments with shaky hands, keeping the beat and holding our heads high. We felt proud to be a part of it, to show the country that a lot of people had a lot of feelings about another potential Republican victory.
Not everyone in the RMO participated in that demonstration; a few hung back, unwilling to risk arrest. Thankfully, none of us who did participate got arrested. Those who stayed behind spent the day setting up a Surprise Unicorn Day Spa for the others. The spa consisted of many stations, each with a sign made from cardboard: cucumber slices for our eyes, a bucket of lavender bath salts for our feet, bottles of Rescue Remedy flower essence, bowls of homemade mud masks, lit candles, freshly baked cookies, cups of white wine, and even a do-it-yourself unicorn-horn-making area with foamcore, tinfoil, scissors and tape. Every photo from the end of that day featured RudeMos covered in layers of green gunk with shiny contraptions strapped to their heads, frolicking in the spray of the backyard hose, and laugh/cry/collapsing in fits of delirious catharsis.
POSTSCRIPT: RETURN, CHANGED
By now, you are thoroughly spent. You've been on the road for so long. Everything is dirty and sore and tired, disgusting and terrible and wonderful. You're covered in blisters, bruises, scratches, callouses, and hickeys. You've forgotten how to make decisions about basic needs like eating, drinking, sleeping, or using the bathroom without consulting 30 other people first. You've gotten really good at your instrument, you've memorized every round of every show tune and folk song in the Rise Up Singing songbook, you've acclimated to napping on a bumpy bus with four other pairs of legs touching yours, you've met lots of brilliant inspiring generous beautiful people in lots of new places, and you've participated in the genesis of countless collective inside jokes that will continue being funny for years.
And now it is time to go home.
Board an airplane in one of the last few cities because you have to get back to New York early for some obligation or other, totally disoriented to be functioning as an autonomous human being for the first time in nearly two weeks, but thrilled to have so much leg room. Or, spend a night in Detroit overhearing ten of your fellow RudeMos, two couples and two thruples, engage in four separate sexual liaisons on the bus at the same time. Later, stumble upon a giant pillowy trampoline resembling an open-air bouncy castle at a campground in Black Rock, WI, and bounce on that fucker like your life depends on it. Later still, pull the bus into the Brooklyn boatyard to see the smattering of bandmates who left tour early or weren't able to go in the first place, standing in a drizzle next to the canal and playing a hastily-arranged "Down By the Riverside," behind a sign that reads WELCOME BACK BRASS BAND.
Unload the bus for the final time. Walk home from the subway station near your apartment carrying your crate, just as a late summer downpour begins. Let everything get soaked. Tip your face to the sky like a baptism.
Keep playing music. Keep dancing. Become chefs, carpenters, filmmakers, puppeteers, writers, librarians, herbalists, midwives, yoga instructors, music teachers, literature professors, massage therapists, physical therapists, childcare specialists, social workers, union organizers, lawyers, programmers, researchers, derby athletes, and professional clowns. Hang onto your friends. Keep speaking truth to power. And when you feel horrified, or despondent, or furious, or afraid, remember the particular kind of absurd, glorious magic that results from the intersections of fierce idealism, commitment to community, sparkly chaos, and weird love. Strive for that, always.
And don't pee on the sequined flag. You'll never hear the end of it.
Before we left New York, each person had volunteered for the duty of either organizing a gig and housing in one of our cities, or co-captaining the activities of the day with one other person. Every morning we had a meeting at 9am, in which we confirmed the agenda for the day ahead and discussed anything that needed to be dealt with from the day before. Tasks such as food cooking, dishwashing, navigating the day's route from printed paper maps, and repacking the storage space under the lounge of the bus rotated among us. This was how an anti-authoritarian, consensus-based project such as ours planned to survive this ambitious undertaking.
We juggled, hula hooped, swam in lakes, did yoga in backyards, led sing-alongs in parks, ate breakfast in gardens and napped among solar panels. In Ohio, we posed for a group photo in front of a sign that said GAY STREET. In Maryland, Roger rollerbladed away from the rest area where we'd stopped for twenty minutes, returning with a box of donuts salvaged from a dumpster and a pair of black patent-leather high heels, origins unknown. In Wisconsin, we treated a group of bemused Midwesterners to a 30-piece a cappella rendition of half our repertoire. In Minnesota, we ran out of protein and had to make do with something called Cantaloupe Soup for dinner.
One night in Indianapolis, we had nowhere to sleep. The collective house where we'd planned to spend the night did not have enough beds and couches for our large group, and the floor was filthy. We'd just played a set in their backyard, as a thank you for the members of the house who'd agreed to host us for the night, only to be shut down by local cops before finishing our set. Trooping back into the house, sweaty and sore, we got another unpleasant surprise: our hosts had been less than forthright with us about how much space the house actually had to put us up. There was no way we were all going to fit, even if some of us spent the night on the bus, which slept eight at most, and poorly. After six days on the road, even the most punk-rock among us knew we had to come up with an alternate plan, and fast.
We discussed. Should we try to squat the abandoned house next door? Several people vehemently blocked this motion, invoking a previous decision we had made not to risk arrest before the RNC. Should some of us sleep in the yard? No, that was more concrete than grass, and littered with splintery bike ramps and broken beer bottles.
Meredith, ever the pragmatist, commandeered the house's only computer and commenced an internet search for nearby campgrounds.
"There's a KOA about five miles from here," she called over the clatter of plates and the slam of the screen door as people went in and out, helping themselves to the pot of vegan polenta on the stove. "It closes in an hour. Do we want to do that?"
One by one we all agreed, and filed back into the bus for the drive, setting up our tents and sleeping bags in the dark once we arrived.
The next morning, I awoke to the sun shining through my tent. I unzipped the flap, shook off the dew, and ventured outside. RudeMos were sleepily walking around in the grass, carrying travel mugs of coffee and bowls of instant oatmeal. Everyone's so cute today, I thought as I took a seat at the picnic table and handed my plate and cup to Hugh. He smiled as he doled me a serving, happy to for once prepare a meal that did not involve hard-boiling our never-ending supply of eggs. His hot pink rat-tail shone in the bright Indiana sun.
That day, our morning meeting took place on the campgrounds. We sat in a circle in the grass, debriefing what had gone right the previous day and what had gone wrong. We agreed that it was essential to confirm with our hosts before we arrived that there was indeed space for all of us to stay, indoors and out. We reviewed the three gigs we'd performed the day before, identifying flubbed musical cues and particularly transcendent solos. We checked on the status of the head injury sustained by a member of T-Spec from another dancer's flying limbs. We congratulated ourselves on making it this far.
It wasn't all learning and growing, though. Couples broke up on tour, friends fought, tensions sometimes flared. One RudeMo gave a tearful plea for just one day's reprieve from being asked any questions, even though he probably knew the answers. Another got so angry at a comment from someone with whom she was having emotional conflict that she flung her travel mug to the ground in the middle of our campground meeting and stalked off into a nearby cornfield. I followed a few paces behind and sat with her in one of the rows as she cried in frustration, stroking her arm and cracking quiet jokes until she laughed through her tears.
STEP TWO: CONVERT THE ENGINE
Establish a relationship with a local vocational program for Brooklyn teenagers. Strike a deal with the principal, in which you agree to teach a handful of music classes for the students that culminate in a show in a nearby park, in exchange for their mechanic converting the engine of your bus to run on vegetable oil. You will be able to get much of this oil for free from diners and Chinese restaurants, as they largely have no use for their massive quantities of leftover oil. Identify plenty of restaurants along your tour route that might be good sources of donated vegetable oil when you're on the road, or at least look the other way. Make some phone calls. Don't worry if they laugh at you, hang up on you, think you're weird, or expressly forbid you from entering their property. This will not be the last time any of this happens.
Buy a filtration pump kit that you can use to procure the vegetable oil from the back of restaurants, industrial trash cans, or wherever the oil you want to use is being stored. This will filter the oil three times and pump it into your gas tank, where it will then go through another filtration system in the newly-converted engine of the bus. Clean the engine filters every 200 miles; otherwise, you will not be able to travel faster than 20mph on any road, including five-lane interstate highways. After you break down on the side of the road at least once a day for the first four days of tour, realize this is not just a suggestion, but an absolute rule.
When the filter suddenly refuses to allow itself to be fully drained and de-mucked somewhere in Pennsylvania, collaboratively devise a solution to hang the entire filtration system from the roof of the bus, allowing gravity to do the emptying for you. Don't worry about being on time. You will never be on time. Even when the filter is clean, the limiter on the engine of the vehicle that spent its former life as a school bus for children will not allow it to go past 55mph. The breeze through the pretty yellow curtains is perfect at that speed; besides, when you finally arrive, everything will smell like French fries.
"Is this your black t-shirt?"
Molly stood in the vestibule of the bus and held up a fistful of dark cloth, gazing out at the group of us assembled on the pavement of a rest area parking lot.
After a moment, Abe mumbled, "That's mine." She tossed it to him. He shook it out a little, then draped it over his shoulder and turned his attention back to her.
Day eight. Illinois. Our morning Lost and Found session. Things were constantly going missing on the bus: clothing, food, journals, sunscreen, sewing kits, cell phones, glitter, drumsticks. So it made sense to have a daily effort to redistribute the belongings that got stuffed into seats and abandoned in the aisles. A few people gave it a go, but Molly was the funniest. Something about her monotone straight-faced delivery struck me as incomparably hilarious. Others seemed to feel the same way; as if elected by an unconscious unanimous vote, she began doing it every day.
"Is this your yogurt?" Brandishing a 32-ounce container of vanilla Dannon, Molly cracked the lid and made a face. "What the fuck is even in here."
Nobody stepped up. Mariah, standing next to me, raised an electronic megaphone and repeated the question. The sound came out in a clipped and nasal timbre, echoing off the asphalt. Still no one moved. Molly set the container down on the floor behind her, then picked up a pair of green and black striped knee socks.
"Are these your stripey socks?"
Commotion ensued. Several people began yelling at once. That was the trouble with outfitting a band of our size in two main colors; a lot of people had the same clothes. This particular pair of socks belonged to at least five of us. I knew where mine were – dirty in my laundry sack, I'd worn them just last night – but several other RudeMos were now jockeying for these. Eventually Bruno triumphed over the melee, his face shining with pride as he rolled the open ends of the socks together and stuffed them in a pocket.
Molly moved on, unruffled.
"Is this your lesbian fiction?" she deadpanned, dangling a copy of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit over her head. A chuckle floated through the group.
"Mine!" piped up Judy's high-pitched voice. She trotted to the front of the crowd, reaching up her hand to Molly, who bestowed the book upon her like a benevolent god. Judy turned around and clutched it to her chest, closing her eyes and smiling beatifically. My upper body pitched forward involuntarily until my head landed on Mariah's shoulder. I laughed, hard and deep from my gut.
STEP THREE: GET EVERYTHING ELSE IN ORDER
Now that you've finished equipping the bus with everything it needs, you'll need to register it as a mobile home. This will ensure that the vehicle is legal to operate on the road without obtaining a Commercial Drivers License, which is an expensive, time-consuming, and ultimately unnecessary process. During the pre-tour insurance inspection, slide the middle bench seats down until they can reasonably approximate a few makeshift beds. Point out to the inspector that, as per mobile home regulation, your vehicle contains a working source of electricity (the power strips run from the battery under the lounge), a kitchen (the camp stove and mini-fridge), a bathroom (no need to show them the pinups), no STOP sign, and no visible yellow paint. Don't worry about what will happen to the bus after tour is over. The band will make good use of it for three more years, after which it will go through several community organizations before it is finally sold to a farmer in upstate New York. A lot of people will be very grateful for your hard work.
Finally, find a volunteer driver. Make sure he has four things: a valid driver's license, a calm demeanor capable of piloting a temperamental school bus carrying 30 weirdos and all their stuff at varying speeds for long hours at a time, a cheerful presence with which to inquire "Can I get a big gay receipt?" of every toll booth operator he encounters, and the kind of steely nerve necessary to inform any marauding police officers that neither he, nor any of the passengers on the bus he is operating, will consent to a search. Bonus points for having an awesome name like Jimmy Appelhanz. Don't worry about him at all, because he is perfect and everyone will love him.
Ten days in, we reached St Paul. Many of us greeted the city with a mixture of relief and anxiety: relief to finally stay in one place for more than one night, anxiety as we approached the RNC protest. Reports from friends who'd been there a few days told us police were swarming the Twin Cities, stopping buses and ransacking their contents. We heard some vehicles had already been impounded and their passengers arrested after officers perceived their intent to participate in the demonstrations. I was not alone in my fervent distrust of cops, and this news made all of us even more nervous.
In the parking lot of a gas station the night before the convention, RMO's legal team was put to the test. We'd just finished playing a gig, and were heading back to the house of our host when a squad car pulled us over. Red and blue lights swirled in the rearview mirror and bounced off the windows, giving the interior of the bus an eerily candied appearance.
Silently, we waited for the cops to board. We'd been practicing for this for days, suspecting the pre-protest police presence might be intense, role playing trial runs of how we would all act if the bus got searched. My heart pulsed in my throat. Rebecca and Sal, our two resident law students, made their way to the front of the bus.
"Hi, how are you doing?" greeted Sal, deliberately pleasant and professional.
"You folks in from out of town?" asked one cop.
"Yes, we're from New York," responded Sal.
The other cop tried to peer around her. Rebecca stepped into his path, blocking his view of the rest of the bus.
"What are you doing in the Twin Cities?" continued the first cop.
"We're in a band. We're visiting some friends," said Rebecca, politely but firmly, with a hand on her hip and the faintest edge of challenge in her voice. I dare you to come on this bus right now, her inflection and body language seemed to be saying.
"There's a protest here tomorrow. Are you planning to be a part of that?" The first cop was not letting it go.
"No, we're not," said Sal.
"You mind if we come in and look around?" questioned the second cop.
"Actually, we do," said Rebecca. "We do not consent to a search of this vehicle."
The second cop looked at the first cop, then back at Sal and Rebecca. Appelhanz spoke up then, saying, "I'm gonna go ahead and not consent to a search either." A long moment passed, during which the officers appeared to recognize that they had no legal ground upon which to keep detaining us. With a grunt from one, and a perfunctory "Well, just stay out of trouble" from the other, they turned and stepped off the bus.
A cheer went up. Sal and Rebecca stared at each other, dazed. Suddenly everyone was jumping up at once, rushing to the front of the bus to hug them, colliding with one another in the aisle and laughing with a collective release of adrenalin and fear.
"RudeMo legal team!" yelled someone from behind me.
Sal grinned and threw her fist in the air. Rebecca just shook her head. Appelhanz started the engine, backed out of the parking lot, and pointed the bus toward the house.
The protest the next day was long, loud, exhausting, and exhilarating. Activists from all over the country filled the streets. Radical Cheerleaders and Raging Grannies danced around, shouting about economic injustice, environmental exploitation and the erosion of civil liberties. Riot police with full-body armor and polycarbonate shields faced off against chanting protesters, arresting the radical journalist Amy Goodman and two producers of her radio show Democracy Now!, among others.
National Lawyers Guild volunteers in neon yellow hats threaded through the crowd, handing out the number of the local Cold Snap Legal Collective, ready to document any police misconduct that went down. At some point Fox News tried to film us performing, so we blocked their video cameras with flags and tubas, incapacitating their boom mike with nonstop snare drum rolls so they couldn't use the footage for their right-wing propaganda channel. Continuing past a line of cops armed with rubber bullets and tear gas, we gripped our instruments with shaky hands, keeping the beat and holding our heads high. We felt proud to be a part of it, to show the country that a lot of people had a lot of feelings about another potential Republican victory.
Not everyone in the RMO participated in that demonstration; a few hung back, unwilling to risk arrest. Thankfully, none of us who did participate got arrested. Those who stayed behind spent the day setting up a Surprise Unicorn Day Spa for the others. The spa consisted of many stations, each with a sign made from cardboard: cucumber slices for our eyes, a bucket of lavender bath salts for our feet, bottles of Rescue Remedy flower essence, bowls of homemade mud masks, lit candles, freshly baked cookies, cups of white wine, and even a do-it-yourself unicorn-horn-making area with foamcore, tinfoil, scissors and tape. Every photo from the end of that day featured RudeMos covered in layers of green gunk with shiny contraptions strapped to their heads, frolicking in the spray of the backyard hose, and laugh/cry/collapsing in fits of delirious catharsis.
POSTSCRIPT: RETURN, CHANGED
By now, you are thoroughly spent. You've been on the road for so long. Everything is dirty and sore and tired, disgusting and terrible and wonderful. You're covered in blisters, bruises, scratches, callouses, and hickeys. You've forgotten how to make decisions about basic needs like eating, drinking, sleeping, or using the bathroom without consulting 30 other people first. You've gotten really good at your instrument, you've memorized every round of every show tune and folk song in the Rise Up Singing songbook, you've acclimated to napping on a bumpy bus with four other pairs of legs touching yours, you've met lots of brilliant inspiring generous beautiful people in lots of new places, and you've participated in the genesis of countless collective inside jokes that will continue being funny for years.
And now it is time to go home.
Board an airplane in one of the last few cities because you have to get back to New York early for some obligation or other, totally disoriented to be functioning as an autonomous human being for the first time in nearly two weeks, but thrilled to have so much leg room. Or, spend a night in Detroit overhearing ten of your fellow RudeMos, two couples and two thruples, engage in four separate sexual liaisons on the bus at the same time. Later, stumble upon a giant pillowy trampoline resembling an open-air bouncy castle at a campground in Black Rock, WI, and bounce on that fucker like your life depends on it. Later still, pull the bus into the Brooklyn boatyard to see the smattering of bandmates who left tour early or weren't able to go in the first place, standing in a drizzle next to the canal and playing a hastily-arranged "Down By the Riverside," behind a sign that reads WELCOME BACK BRASS BAND.
Unload the bus for the final time. Walk home from the subway station near your apartment carrying your crate, just as a late summer downpour begins. Let everything get soaked. Tip your face to the sky like a baptism.
Keep playing music. Keep dancing. Become chefs, carpenters, filmmakers, puppeteers, writers, librarians, herbalists, midwives, yoga instructors, music teachers, literature professors, massage therapists, physical therapists, childcare specialists, social workers, union organizers, lawyers, programmers, researchers, derby athletes, and professional clowns. Hang onto your friends. Keep speaking truth to power. And when you feel horrified, or despondent, or furious, or afraid, remember the particular kind of absurd, glorious magic that results from the intersections of fierce idealism, commitment to community, sparkly chaos, and weird love. Strive for that, always.
And don't pee on the sequined flag. You'll never hear the end of it.