The world of piracy in Seattle is not as I once knew it. It seems that the Seafair Pirates have gone soft. They don’t even seem to know how to act like pirates these days, being stripped to their skivvies of all the things that makes pirootin’ fun.
I recently discovered that in they no longer get to scrape their swords on the streets. They can’t touch kids or women, such as put their hand on their shoulder in a photo. They no longer get to pretend to take someone hostage, chase people down the street or fire a shotgun off the back of the Moby Duck, their rolling dumpster of a parade vehicle.
How did I learn this? Well, it was on the radio and it’s right here in print. I couldn’t believe my own eyes. I had to read it three times to totally get the gist that the pirates have had their “(cannon)balls” clipped.
Yes, the Seafair Pirates have turned into a the Seafair Pantywaists. I’m not really sure what happened in the intervening years since I was with them. We had already tamed things down a quite a bit when I was in the group 20 years ago. Yes, there was that episode where the flight attendant was shackled in the party room. But that was in the 1960s, before my time.
These days, they invite their wives and girlfriends to certain events. What is up with that? That certainly would have messed up what we had going on with our pirate girlfriends back in the day.
But some things don’t change. They are still just as full of themselves as always. In the article, they claim that you couldn’t start an organization like theirs today because people are more uptight and cities are more regulated.
My devilish days as a Seafair Pirate. Mug of beer in hand, sword ready to drag.
Uh-huh. I guess they didn’t notice that there are still pirate groups that can put their arm around a girl in a photo, fire off guns on the street, chase kids and drag their swords down a sidewalk. I’ve been with these groups… in the Northwest… within the last couple months.
In fact, there are groups all over the country that do this same schtick. In Florida certainly, there are pirates who are loaded to the gunnels with weapons on city streets, put their arms around women, fire guns and cannons and act like, well, the Seafair guys used to act. There are literally thousands of pirates and perhaps a hundred pirate groups all over the country.
I can’t really blame them entirely for their lackluster performance as pirates. They answer to a higher authority that most of us don’t – Seafair. The organization has them listed on their liability policy, and that’s probably what put the kabosh on their antics, not the desire to be politically correct.
Still, I don’t get it. If I were still with them there would have already been a mutiny. We would have just dropped the “Seafair” from the name and called ourselves the Seattle Pirates.
But I guess the old gang just doesn’t have the stomach for such things. As such, other groups around the country have stolen their thunder. Oh sure, they still have Moby Duck. The two garbage cans of beer on board are gone now though. And they still get to go through all the motions of running a parade, though they can’t get too close, can’t put a sword to the pavement, and they certainly can’t touch anyone.
I would imagine then that the days of pinning women with the “I’ve Been Had” button are long gone too. If you can’t touch a woman, you certainly aren’t going to be able to slip your fingers down her blouse, just so you can make sure you “don’t pop anything with the sharp end of the pin.”
I wonder if they are still allowed to get the old kiss on the cheek. It was never a kiss on the cheek, mind you. Getting kissed on the lips was the way a pirate “had” you, at least in public.
At night, it was off to the packed party room where you could be “had” in the biblical sense. All the booze a woman could drink. Men were never on the invite list. It would have reduced the odds of the pirates getting lucky that night. And boy, did the boys get lucky back then. It was like being a bloody rock star. Get the girls a little tipsy, put the moves on them and talk them into seeing your collection of whatever you said you had up in your room.
It didn’t always work, but you still played the odds. And if a wife or girlfriend dropped by, the “red alert” was sent out throughout the hotel. The guys would wrangle the girls and get them out of the hotel before they found the love of their life in the sack with someone else.
But now, the pirates are all PC. They can’t act like pirates anymore. That’s left to the other groups in town, in the state and in the whole bloody country. They have to do their bidding for them.
They may have had to tone it down, but the rest of the pirate community is just as raucous as ever. Geez, am I glad I went out on my own years ago. I don’t do PC very well. And I really like having my balls back. I’d hate to have to surrender them all over again just to be a cartoon version of what a pirate used to be in this town.
I suppose it won’t be too long before you see the pirates walking down a parade route with velvet ropes surrounding them. As they move slowly down the road, waving to the crowd, void of any shred of piracy, we will marvel at the relics they have become… pirates without any piracy left in them, only political correctness. Something that is better off in a museum than the streets of our fair cities.
In the Emerald City, fresh from dragging my bloody sword down the street,
– Robb