Lil' Rick's Birthday Bash last Saturday sure was an eye-opener.

I had my doubts about it being pulled off at the Gymnasium, but everybody and dem parakeet turned up to the fete! The entire floor area of the Gym (except for the stage) was packed! What's that, like 2000...3000 people?

As soon as I entered I noticed that the air was fair to partly cloudy. Someone told me that was due to the smoke machine set up in the corner. Yeah right...like that was fooling anybody! As if everything under the sun wasn't being smoked in there that night! Silly me,

Oh, and I must say, the ladies were undressed to kill! About 1 in 4 females was wearing a form-fitting minidress, the skirt hem of which ended "thisclose" to their crotch area! The whole night the silly girls were walking around tugging at their clothes as they hitched up.
The guys in the camera crew were beside themselves.

Of course, you just can't wear a dress without the weave to match. There was pink hair, green hair, yellow hair (no, not blonde, yellow) and one cutting edge chick in lace-up white boots had what looked like rainbow-coloured bird feathers on her head. After a while I felt kinda drab.

As the night progressed, we remarked on how surprisingly incident-free this event seemed to be going. Well somebody must have jinxed it, because not long after that the sea of people that filled the Gym burst into a stampede in all directions!
The reasonably large stage, upon which I was liming, was rocked by the sudden force of people being pushed against it! As people started bounding on to the stage, I tried not to panic. I stayed put for as long as I dared, then I dodged my way down to where a couple crew members were trying to protect the camera equiptment from the stumbling crowd. Women snatched off their heels in order to run unhindered, big hardback men scampered like spooked cattle, and a few people were pushed to the ground (bet they wish they wore pants under those dresses now!).
I won't lie, that was some scary ish, but I felt better when a camera man exclaimed afterwards "You...my hands cyan stop shaking!"

Special props go to Peter Ram, who would easily win the award for "Mr. Calm, Cool and Collected 2005". Brotha man, in his sharp-ass brown pinstripe suit, maintained his position before, during and after the commotion: chilling against a wall. I don't even think his drink was spilled. That alone could earn him at least a nomination for the next James Bond movie.

Up to now I'm not sure what set off all those people. Some say they heard a gunshot, but I don't recall hearing anything like that.

All I know is that it wasn't a gunshot that scared me, it was that panic seems to turn a crowd into mindless, stampeding wildebeest.