obstreperous.

[uh b-strep-er-uh s]

adjective

1. resisting control or restraint in a difficult manner; unruly.
2. noisy, clamorous, or boisterous.

Newspapers, posters, and word of many mouths advertised a town-wide planned power outage for Tuesday from 11pm-7am. Everything in town would be pitch-black due to a necessary pole replacement.

The only place downtown with a generator? The Saloon. So our usual closing time of 10:30-11ish would change to 2am. Tuesday was supposed to be my day off. My coworker’s parents were in town and she was bummed to hear her opening shift was turning into a 3:30pm-2am shift.

It seemed like a win/win situation to let my coworker spend time with her family while I could experience “The Great Planned Power Outage of 2015.” So I gladly took the shift and drank enough coffee to remain chipper late into the night.

It wasn’t as busy as they anticipated, so they sent the bouncer home. The bartender said, “Beth will do it. She can check IDs at the door.”

“I’m going to be the bouncer?!” I asked. He nodded, confused as to why this was exciting to me.

“I can’t wait to call my mom and say, ‘My hard work in pursuing a religion and philosophy degree has paid off; I’m a bouncer at a saloon!’”

I told my customers, “I’m the bouncer tonight, so let’s keep everything under control and I need to see your identification.” They laughed hard as they looked me up and down.

“If someone wanted to come in, they could pick you up and move you over…”

I said, “Hey, hey, hey” and pointed my finger at them, as if their statement wasn’t true. Was I prepared to actually deal with any obstreperous folks? No way!

Some people ran out on the street to witness the blackout. The lights went out at exactly 11. There was about a thirty second pause before the generator kicked on and everyone screamed, “Happy New Year!”

As I was leaving for the evening, my fun obstreperous crew of customers started chanting, “BETH THE BOUNCER! BETH THE BOUNCER!”

I was beaming as I walked to my car. But I still needed my high-powered flashlight from Tampa Bay Outfitters.

This was the view to my left:

And this was the view of Main Street, the Saloon lighting up the night:

I decided to lay in the backyard because the sky was on fire. I saw six shooting stars and then slept like a rock.