Badassery One Day at a Time

Today, on the sign line, the woman next to me leaned over and said, “I feel like one of those folks dressed up like the Statue of Liberty at tax time.”

“Or Gumby!” I said, waving myself around like the giant inflatables in front of 5 -minute oil changes stores. “At least we know we’ve got career options, right?”

That’s it. Banter makes me laugh. And there was plenty of it today on our sign line, which, if you don’t know, is a group of people standing at a major intersection holding signs. In this case, we were holding signs about Wisconsin’s monumentally important upcoming Supreme Court election. We have a woman who has been a circuit court judge for a good while and is very solid and fair running against an Elon Musk-funded right-wing judge who has pledged to be part of Donald Trump’s support network.

Anyway, we were getting a lot of thumbs up and nice horn beeps from passing cars when there began to be a loud piercing sound, like a very intense car alarm. We looked around to see its source – across the street? in the gas station?

No. The sound came from behind us from a guy sounding an air horn, a very, very loud air horn. He sat in a smallish care, positioned to be directly behind our line and blasted his horn, resting his finger every three or four minutes and then starting up again.

Not a friendly guy, but a big one, heavy duty with a big head and a beard. Right out of central casting.

So, the leader of our little group had a chat with him, that I presumed didn’t go well because he kept blasting his horn. She approached him and I followed, thinking that we ought to offer reinforcements, and we both took photos of his license plate. This went on for a good while, the harasser moving his car here and there to irritate different people. And then we jointly decided to ‘make this guy famous.’

I decided to take his picture and put it on Facebook. So I approached his car, he put up his window and I yelled (and I owe the ingeniousness of this approach to Rockford), “Hey! You look like my brother George’s friend!” And he put down his window and I snapped a bunch of pictures. Then I very obviously stopped my sign waving to tap on my phone. I looked up and he drove away. The group leader had also caught him on video so double fame.

Driving home, I reflected on this. Where I’d gotten the little chutzpah to go up to this big guy’s car, especially considering he was armed with an air horn, and get him to put down his window by talking about my brother George (which I made up because my actual brother’s name was John, but he is now deceased), and I shouted out to no one but myself, “I’m a badass!” It’s not just on my favorite mug. It’s really true. This old girl is a badass. Well, today anyway, with this one guy, I was a badass and what do they say?

It’s all one day at a time.