In 1999 Bill Clinton was in the White House, Jeff Bezos was TIME’s man of the year, American Beauty won best picture, Ask Jeeves was your search engine, you were listening to music on CDs, but you still had a bunch of cassettes around, the #1 song on Saturday June 5 was “livin la vida loca” by Ricky Martin, the Nokia 3210 was a very popular phone as text messaging was taking over and pagers were faing out, messengers still carried pagers and brick-sized radios and called into base on landlines when they could and they could smoke in bars and restaurants and talk about the Y2K bug.
In 1999 Devlin and I put on a little alley cat. It was $5 to race and everyone got a prize of some sort and all the beer they could drink. It was a simple 8 or 10 stops around town. Mike Dodge got first place and $150 in cash and a modified thriftstore trophy. Brad Lewis in second got $50 cash. Both Dodge and Brad were cat 1-2 racers and they said they’d never won prizes that big in any of their races. The remaining prizes were things like soccer balls, bike parts, t-shirts, retro bike jersies and gift certificates to Sammy Sue’s.
We put up a few flyers around town and a Red Bull rep tracked me down by asking around. I wasn’t looking for him. He found me and gave me $200 in cash and a case of Red Bull. The Elysian gave us two kegs if we promised to consume the beer far away from their place of business. The start and finish festivities took place at the 19th Ave E party house 24 years ago today.
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