“This isn’t Disneyland!” Little Alison grumped.
“This is better than Disneyland,” Papa Doric assured her. “This is real.”
“Yeah!” Alison’s older brother Petey told her. “Listen to that music – you don’t get anything like that!”
The “music” he was referring to was the crowd of perhaps 200 people chanting, “My body, my choice. My body my choice. My body, my choice.”
“It isn’t exactly ‘Let It Go.'” Alison muttered.
“You letting it go would sound good right about now,” Petey counter-muttered.
The Kludge family stood towards the back of the crowd. To their near left, a masked woman asked a man in a “Jesus Matters: My body belongs to god, it will not be defiled” t-shirt who was avidly chanting, “My body, my choice? If you believe that, you must believe in abortion, right?” The man looked like he was about to respond, then he punched her in the face.
“How’s that for action?” Mama Ionia exulted.
“It’s not exactly Pumba versus Scar,” Alison grumbled. Louder, she added: “And, anyway, haven’t you taught us that we should settle our differences without resorting to violence?”
“Some people just can’t be reasoned with,” Doric argued, causing he and Ionia to laugh gaily.
“Get with the programme!” Petey admonished his sister. Alison looked at him for a moment, weighing her options. Then, she shoved him.
“Hey!” Petey protested as he righted himself.
“Alison, don’t push your brother!” Ionia further admonished her daughter.
“I just couldn’t reason with him,” Alison smugly stated.
Doric wasn’t sure if he should be proud or scornful of his daughter’s actions. He was saved from having to respond by a kerfuffle to the family’s right. A dozen protesters watched the speaker at the front of the crowd drone on about how he didn’t know what was in the COVID vaccine, so he refused to take it because it would clearly make him sick (punctuated only by his need to take a couple of puffs of an inhaler on the hot, hazy day); a couple carried American flags.
A man passing by had stopped and asked, “You know Toronto is still part of Canada, don’t you?”
“Yeah, so?” a man waving a “Don’t tread on me” flag replied.
“So, don’t you think we have enough problems without importing American radicalism?”
Don’t tread on me looked at the man for a second, then cold-cocked him.
Alison shivered in delight. “Isn’t that exciting?” she asked her children.
“It’s not exactly Pinocchio’s Daring Journey,” Alison said under her breath.
“Honey, you’ll have your entire life to go on…that,” Ionia assured her. She had always found Pinocchio’s nose to be too phallic for comfort. “Right here, right now, you’re watching history being made. Nothing will ever compare to that!”
“History is violent!” Alison commented.
“Now, sweetie, you know what I always say,” Doric told her: “You have to break some noses to make an omelette.”
Alison had never heard her father say that. And, it didn’t make any sense. Before she could point any of this out, Ionia told her to hush and listen to the speaker.
Different man, same drone. This time, it was about microchips in vaccines that would allow the government to read the thoughts of every citizen in the country – the ultimate invasion of privacy! He talked about having a dream of a world where the government actually respected human rights.
As if on cue, a black man walking past a woman in an “Unvaccinated Lives Matter” t-shirt, stopped and said, “Don’t you feel any shame, any shame at all, appropriating slogans from the social justice movement to promote your twisted ideas of freedom?”
The woman in the t-shirt looked at him and mused, “Hmm…how best to respond to your criticism. Oh, I know…” She decked him.
Before Alison could object, the Kludges noticed a short figure striding through the crowd. He wore a muscle shirt to emphasize the broad power of his chest and short shorts to emphasize…the scrawniness of his chicken legs. Everywhere he went, people in the crowd high fived him or gave him a “you da man” finger point. It was like he was a AAA battery being recharged.
“Is that – no, it can’t be!” Doric gasped in awe. “It is! It’s…Chris Sky!”
“Is that – no, it can’t be!” Alison gasped in awe. “It is! It’s…Lord Farquaad!”
She immediately forgot her reservations about where they had ended up. Lord Farquaad was here? Now, it was a vacation!