Gay Night At Great America

Memorial Day weekend is the tradional start of the summer season in America. While it's quite famous as the first weekend to safely wear white shoes and enjoy back yard bar-b-Qs, in the bay area, Memorial Day Weekend means Gay Day at Paramount's Great America Amusement Park.

I went with Irwin this year

I had fun with my pal Puppy last year and hoped we could go togther again this year. He had to go to Brazil for work so I was on my own. Luckily, my pal Irwin works in Santa Clara and could leave work a little early to pick me up at the Caltrain station. I met Irwin at last year's gay night at Great America so it was cool that we got to go together this year...

I felt so special when I got watched

Star Watch is Launched
My pal Jeremy still works at the park coordinating the special events and we met up with him at the Will Call window to get our tickets. He asked me to help test a new locator system introduced at the park. It's called "Star Watch". Everyone in your group or family gets a little plastic thing to wear on your wrist. Because it was the first time the system was 'live' in the park, only employees and their friends were using it. Besides myself there were about six other people in Jeremy's group. Once we all had our watches programmed with our names, we began to wander the park. The Star Watch system has eight kiosks peppered throughout the park. I tried three or four of them to track the movements of the rest of our group. I think they still have some bugs to work out of the system because the sensor wasn't sensative enough and the touch screen was too sensative, but after a few tweaks, I think it will be great for families. I can see parents hanging out with their younger kids and letting their teenagers wander around while keeping tabs on their whereabouts.

Still a chance to find some friends.

This event is a great place to run into friends both old and new. A couple of times, we ran into my pal Greg, his BF Gary and their pal Pat. I came to this event with them in 2002.

Blackstone DJed on the club stage
Stone has DJed at this event every year for a while now and it's always nice to see him having fun. He was still too busy to ride a roller coaster with us, but I suppose there is always next year for that. I saw a lot of the kids from his weekly Thursday night club wandering around the park and even managed to dance with some of them.