No Kings 3

No Kings 3 I woke up tired, which is not great on a day when you have to marshal a big march. I started gathering necessary items – water, snacks, ID (just in case). Connor was watching from his spot near my pillow and - realizing that I was packing to head out instead of spending my day off at home with cats- began to glare as hard as he could. It was a chilly morning with a cold wind blowing but I don’t like to marshal in my bulky winter coat - the back often involves a lot of big arm gestures, guiding people into the march and things like delivery bikes away from the march - so I layered one sweatshirt over another. Heading to the marshal meet up, in a public space on 57th st, I found myself thinking about Dad. That whole neighborhood makes me think of him. I know he would march if he could – I remember him coming to pro-choice marches when I was too young to go alone, strolling along with a cigar in his hand. My mother told me about how they went to the March on Washington in DC. My dad was twenty years older than her and a lot of the other young people who were making their way down, and instead of piling on buses or carpooling like a lot of the others, Dad bought Amtrak tickets. My mother, broke but rapidly shedding the veneer of privilege that had clung to her as a girl who had come to study at Barnard, took off her earrings and put them in a collection plate. At 12pm, the space was already full of people pulling on green vests and straining to hear Jamie, who was standing on the outdoor furniture. In one corner, the pink vested medics and their equipment were massing. Lead marshals were handed assignments and left to gather our teams from the groups of marshals who had been divided by experience level, so that each team would be a mix. A couple of women who came to me at first dropped out when they found out we were the back so a couple of guys replaced them, leaving me with a very rare all-male marshal team. I checked in with BC, busy reassuring a private security guard who was perturbed to find her “public” space filled with 400 or so people in neon vests and then, freezing, we headed off to check out our assigned location and find a sunny spot to wait. Heading out of the space, we acquired Jeanne, another ACT UP era marshal. When we got to our spot, the only sun was inside the park, near where the carriage horses stood awaiting rides. I always feel bad for the horses. I wish they could just stay in the park all the time, away from the chaos of city streets. “You’re a cutie,” I said to one tan horse, who swung its long nose in my direction. “Do you want scritches?” I asked, like it was a gigantic cat, and then proceeded to oblige. We settled nearby, standing in a circle to review the notes for our area – close central park south to westbound traffic, usher a group of families with children out of the park and into the march, coordinate a giant, half block banner of the constitution joining the march. By 1:30pm the sidewalk was filling up with people. We were watching the pretzel cart guy raise his prices as the crowd grew, a very contemporaneous and probably illegal example of the principle of supply and demand. The police had closed all of Central Park South, but we stood in our intersection directing bikes to turn around and answering the usual questions about the route and timing. Several people with signs came toward us, heading east. “You’re marching in the wrong direction,” I told them jokingly. “We came for a while,” said one “but somebody just donated a kidney to her sister, so we have to go.” “That’s a good reason,” said a nearby marshal to me, watching them hurry off. A woman with colorful hair zeroed in on me in the crowd – a late marshal, she had been sent to join our team. She was in a pink vest so someone asked if she was a medic. “I’m a public health professor,” she said, so we all started joking with her about how that would come in handy if we had an outbreak of TB or Ebola on the march. Her teaching skills were actually more likely to come in handy – teachers are used to instructing people and holding the line. We already had a retired junior high school teacher on the team. A few right wing youtubers started showing up, so I messaged Troll Patrol, the de-escalation team and they came to handle them. A woman on our side, megaphone in hand, was yelling incoherently about pedophiles but we just filled in the space around her with people until she quieted down. The signal chat was filling up with messages about problems to the west “they won’t let us close 9th ave” etc and it suddenly became clear that although we had been totally public about the plan to do two parallel marches, the idea was so outside the norm that it did not register with the police that we were planning to take Broadway, too. That created some resistance until the police gave in to the unyielding determination of activists and the massive crowds showing up. It was still well before even the early step off time we had planned, when a large contingent emerged from the park, surged across the street, and headed down 7th Ave. I thought they were just going to stage themselves on that block of 7th ave but they kept on going. “Large group marching south on 7th” I wrote on the chat, trying to alert marshals farther down. I thought maybe they would stop them and have the march catch up to them, but at the end Jamie mentioned a pre-march of about 500. Next was a commotion to the west of us – the huge constitution banner, instead of entering from the east as planned, where there was plenty of space, entered from the west and immediately became stuck in the crowd. I sent a few people to go retrieve it and then once it was in location, we turned it around so it was facing the right way. Then the people who were holding it every few feet untied their sections and unrolled it, holding it waist heigh above the ground. Motion underneath the banner caught my eye and I spotted a woman in a George Washington wig and a mini dress rolling around under there, displaying her red polka dot panties. I wasn’t sure what side she was on, but a nearby Troll Patroller told me she wasn’t a problem, just one more unusual individual in the crowd. The people holding the banner seemed unperturbed and I wasn’t sure what we would do about it anyway, since talking to her would have required crawling under the banner ourselves. Getting a banner that large around the corner onto 7th Ave was no easy task, especially while being continuously approached from the east by people on Citi Bikes who kept saying that the app showed that the nearby bike dock was empty. I kept explaining to them that that was because nobody could get to it. I wonder if next time we can alert citi bike and the delivery apps so they can put up some kind of notice. Organizers had already informed the many garages and parking places along the route, and marshals even explained to the carriage drivers that they should go elsewhere since they weren’t going to be able to get out that side of the park for some time. When the back finally started moving, after 3pm, we herded all the people standing around into it, and fell in step behind. “Act like sheepdogs,” I had told my team, and they did, rounding up all the people entering the march from all directions, and falling behind for various reasons, including an older man who was riding a skateboard with two canes for balance and propulsion. This novelty was drawing a lot of attention and he kept pausing for photos, winding up at the very back of the march. As we headed farther south, the side teams who had finished their jobs kept adding themselves to the back until we had half a block of loosely packed folks strolling along in their green vests. Some of the community affairs cops seemed to forget that they were supposed to be at the very back and wandered into the marshal march, bright blue jackets standing out in the sea of green. It was 5pm by the time we got to 35th st, unable to continue because the constitution was now on the ground. I was hoping that they were about to roll it up but instead people were surrounding it signing their names. BC headed up front to check things out, came back and said “Jamie’s mad about the constitution,” with a shrug. There really wasn’t anything we could do but stand there while the handlers started unscrewing parts of the frame. By that point both feet and my ankle were on fire with pain, so instead of sticking around for final herding people onto the sidewalk duties, I headed to the subway. I got home and crashed hard, waking up at 10pm to find my facebook feed almost completely full of nothing but No Kings photos from everywhere. I knew that the next day the arguments about whether these big marches accomplish anything would resume, but at that moment the mood was pretty jubilant as people reveled in the feeling that in a world that feels dark and crazy, those that stand for justice and democracy are not alone.