Rednecks Converge On Charlotte

Well it’s that time of year again…the one weekend where every redneck (wow, there’s a Wiki on rednecks???) willing to shell out enough money to A) travel to Charlotte and B) buy a ticket for the Coca-Cola 600 converges on downtown Charlotte for an event affectionately called Speed Street.  There are a few good things about Speed Street:

• The people watching is absolutely wonderful…more mullets than you can shake a stick at.
• They sell both kinds of beer…Budweiser and Bud Light.  Yum.
• Did I mention the people watching?
• It brings in a shitload of money to Charlotte…500,000 ‘necks who want to spend money (though of course I get no personal benefit from this other than knowing that rednecks love Charlotte…it is is the birthplace of NASCAR in case you didn’t know).
• It’s free to attend, and invariably at least one somewhat decent band shows up.
• It’s free to attend, and invariably at least a dozen or so rednecks end up making complete fools out of themselves.  Nothing better than watching drunk rednecks.

Downsides?  Hmm…I’ll mention the obvious:

• You do not want to be caught dead in downtown Charlotte club over this weekend unless, well, you’re a redneck.
• About 1/4 of the city is blocked off, which means getting ANYWHERE is virtually impossible without fighting a ton of traffic.
• It always happens on the weekend after my birthday.  Always.
• Lots of bikers show up (nothing against the bikers, just the bikes themselves…too loud…I do need sleep ya know).

It’s worth mentioning that I worked at Speed Street a couple of years back (Tonya landed us a one evening gig)…I think she was one of the kind folks checking ID’s for drink tickets, and I got lucky enough to work at a beer pulling stand…in front of the stage that 3 Doors Down (IIRC) was playing on, so at least I had some live music (even if I’m not really fond of that band) to entertain me as I pulled what seemed to be a gazillion cups of beer.  It rained that night, so I ended up drenched in H20 and beer…but made 200 bucks for 5 hours of work (if you can call it work…well actually, people are quite demanding about how much foam is in their beer, but aside from that it was quite easy), plus I got all the free beer I wanted afterwards.  She ended up getting…hit on by a bunch of rednecks.  Ahh the memories.

Long live Speed Street.