Dan’s Papers March 9, 2012 danshamptons.com Page 10
Whiskey
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Having heard that, the Friends of Erin tried another tack. How about we have the parade begin at 10 am instead of at 12:30 pm as it has for the last 49 years? If it did that, the parade would be nearly over by the time the trains pulled in. We’ll have tricked them. Ha! The bigwigs who run the railroad will slap their foreheads and say—how could we have missed this? And so, these drunken teenagers hop off the train, and guess what! No parade! It’s too bad. Time to go back home. Nothing going on here. Let’s go home. This is flawed logic. Have you ever been to a parade that is so grand and so long that it takes three and a half hours to pass one spot? If you have, you will probably recall being there when it starts and then leaving in the middle, or showing up when the parade is in the middle and staying to the end. Will people care if they don’t make it for the start of the parade? They will have swamped the town as they always do. There will be fights, people arrested, people falling down drunk. And there will be the parade. They will see the parade. Half of it anyway. Perfect. Then, as it turns out, with the parade ending at 1 pm, these kids will be free to spend the rest of the day, many of them with their false ID’s going to bars and raising a ruckus until dark and even afterwards. The trains head back at 1:23 p.m., 3:33 p.m., 5:32 p.m. and 7:33 p.m. I’m told that in prior years, there has been so little surveillance of the no drinking laws by the few MTA police on the train that as the trains begin to slow to approach the Montauk station, windows of the cars are opened and all
manner of booze is hurled out into the woods. Why? Because you have to finish it. The Town Police are out at that station in huge numbers with other police in force, joined by many officers from adjacent towns looking to arrest people getting off the train drunk. Better to have jettisoned all the stuff before the train gets in. We’ll buy some more. On Sundays, the saloons open at noon. (I’ve also been told that in prior years, some of the passengers actually leap off the moving train to follow their booze as the trains lumber through the woods.) And so the days go by leading up to March 25. As for the railroad, having discovered the change in the start of the parade—ah ha! They’re trying to get this one by us— the powers that be have said that they will send out enough trains to accommodate all of the people who want to go to the parade via the LIRR. In my opinion, there is only one good way of dealing with this. Organize the Montauk Vigilantes. On parade day, half an hour before that first train is scheduled to pull in, have the Vigilantes head out down the tracks on horseback into the woods toward Amagansett. Three miles in, up where the train passes through the thick Hither Woods, drop a heavy barrier of wood and steel across the tracks, then head up into the hills. When that first train screeches to a halt before the barrier, everybody comes down with rifles drawn, surrounds the train and demands that everyone on board toss out all the booze and other valuables. Then all that has to
happen is everybody just sits there for the next three and a half hours until everybody sobers up. (Have the Montauk Fire Department Auxiliary ladies out there with donuts and coffee.) After that, let them go. The people on that train and the two behind it can go on through to enjoy the rest of the day, sober, at least for awhile. They won’t soon forget this.
Biblical
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music and picnicking. Two groups can’t be on the same place at the same time. Can they? The Board chose to consider a biblical solution. What would King Solomon do? He would split it up, of course: The Art Show will have exclusive use of the Green on Saturday, but only partial use on Sunday, when their operation will retreat from a part of the green where the flagpole and memorial are. On Sunday morning, a parade will leave Second House at the other end of town, come down Main Street, circle once around the outside of the green (containing the partial art show) and then march in where the space is cleared to have their memorial ceremony. Traffic through downtown will be diverted for three hours. The art show will vacate entirely on Monday so the Vets can have the green on the actual Memorial Day, but inasmuch as there are other activities to celebrate Memorial Day in nearby East Hampton, the vets probably won’t make much use of it.