5,000 undead to swarm the West Bank: Zombie Pub Crawl grows to frightening proportions
See Jon Behm's photos of the 2008 Zombie Pub Crawl
It's October again, and while many have their sights set on Halloween, I have had my calendar marked for the fifth annual Zombie Pub Crawl ever since the morning after the fourth annual Zombie Pub Crawl last year. The Minneapolis Zombie Pub Crawl, the oldest and largest of its kind (yes, there are more of them), consists of thousands of zombie-loving citizens donning ripped clothes and fake blood and proceeding to wander, as the undead, down a preset path of participating bars. This Saturday, a pack of zombies will once again take to the streets for "Zombie Pub Crawl V: It's Starting To Stink" and all are invited to join, though perhaps it's a little easier for those of legal drinking age to participate.
The festivities will begin at 4 p.m. in Gold Medal Park, where the horde will gather before embarking on the crawl. At the park there will be time to put on your zombie makeup; a little fake flesh and blood are provided, and there will be merchandise for sale and general pre-crawl carousing. At 5 p.m. the crawl itself begins, running a 1.5-mile trek from Gold Medal Park down Washington and along Cedar Avenue, hitting 15 bars along the way. The path also passes several local restaurants and the promoters urge crawl-goers to support these local businesses while participating in the other festivities.
Attendance has been growing ever since its first year, and this year the Zombie Pub Crawl organizers are expecting as many as 5,000 zombies to swam the streets, the largest to date. Each bar will be featuring a zombie drink special, usually ordered by simply groaning "braaaaains" at the bartender, or, for the more polite zombie, asking nicely. Several of the bars are also featuring live bands and karaoke, and the finale party held at the Cabooze will feature Solid Gold and the Moon Goons.
There is no cover for the opening at Gold Medal Park, or for the crawl itself—except, of course, the purchase price of the drinks. The finale party at the Cabooze will be $8.00 at the door, or free with purchase of a V.I.Z. pass from the Web site. So put on some old clothes, cook up some fake blood, roll around in the dirt, round up a couple of undead friends, and head downtown this weekend.
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Nora Leinen (nora@tcdailyplanet.net) is an English Literature major at the University of Minnesota with an interest in theory and American studies.
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Comments
Zombies are #@*holes
After work at a local cafe last year, a trip to the grocery store around the corner on Cedar around 9pm meant wading through the zombie hordes. Which was fun at first, until I encountered a group of what must have been among the drunkest zombie pub crawlers, falling over themselves and me, and a neighborhood mother and child on their way out of the grocery store. They weren't just acting zombie-essque, they were grabbing non-zombie passers-by and sometimes yelling obscenities (i thought "brains" was the only word zombies could utter.) Further down the street another group was the same way, then another group. Organizers of this great event (I went 3 years ago, and the zombies respected the neighborhood a lot more. I didn't see a single one about to pass out) may want to police it a bit before the city decides it's a risk or neighborhood residents complain too much for the city to ignore (why not just keep it downtown where all the jerks are anyway, and where there are few residents with families and such?). The day after last year's event, the street, full of trash and dripping with fake blood, looked like a 40 car pile up had taken place the night before. I guess zombies don't clean up after themselves. #@*holes.
--Troy
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