She wanted a circus. She pretty much got one.

Annoyed Angel has already posted a much better recap of Saturday’s Asshat Tweetup than I could ever write; if you haven’t seen it yet, you can find it here.

There are, of course, a couple things I can add:

  • Finding people who wanted to say nice things about AA while I had camera stuck in their faces? Not hard at all.
  • My pants-free sisters — and even Pittsburgh’s future pantless mayor — let me down, just because the temperature dropped below 40 degrees.
  • The rugby folks I talked to at length on Saturday are, without exception, very cool people. I hope we can find a way to hang out with them again soon.
  • I’ve said this before: I’m going to miss that bar.
  • The promised wardrobe changes weren’t too outrageous, but if you haven’t yet seen the feather-boa-bustier thing, you really, really should.
  • And as long as you’re looking at pictures, you should check out some more here. For example:
A T-shirt from a bar in Athens? How cool is that?
A T-shirt from a bar in Athens? How cool is that?

As you’re going through the pictures, you’ll see a few featuring a champagne bottle. That’s the bottle we passed around outside Ruggers on New Years Day, just after we took that swim in the Mon. I didn’t know until a few days later that AA had kept the bottle, inscribed it with the Twitter names of everyone who swam with us and — because the bar had served as a home base for the morning — placed it up top, right at the front corner above the bar. It sat on that shelf with rugby memorabilia since then, and I know I felt a little bit like I had a place at Ruggers because my name was on that bottle. But as we planned for the Tweetup, we agreed that the bottle belonged to the people who made the swim, and not to the bar, so AA’s final act as a bartender there was to pull that bottle down and hand it to the plungers who were there.

And: I never got a chance to ask her about it, but Chachi said AA thought I should be the one keep it. That was the part of the night that was hard for me — although we had met and talked before, I think really got to know AA because of the plunge, and I was blown away that she wanted me to keep the one memento from that day. It’s sitting in my little bedroom office right now — I’m looking at it as I type — and it’ll stay here until we finally have our bar in the basement ready to go.

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The most important thing? Everyone — YinzTeamers, ruggers and everyone else who crowded Ruggers Pub all night — did right by AA. Thanks to everyone who came out.