Cheerleaders Aid Cops By Totally Ripping Me Off

I've been trying really hard to not click on the headline announcing "Cheerleaders Help Cops Nab Crash Suspect." I figure "They" have done some sort of market research that pretty much guarantees that headlines with the words "cheerleaders" and "cops" get clicked on way more often than those without. I just didn't want to be such a predictable, Pavlovian easy mark. ("You write 'cops and cheerleaders'; I immediately click!") I weakened today, and discovered that a team of cheerleaders basically did exactly what I did about 2 years ago, except that I was acting alone and in intimidating circumstances, and it wasn't all bouncy cheery teamwork fun. Oh, and they actually helped catch a wanted criminal. Whereas I didn't, but did behave a little bravely. And stupidly.

In my case, I was walking down the main strip on the way home. Two girls slightly ahead of me paused on the corner and then entered the crosswalk, which was marked with a stop sign, and began to cross. There was a car approaching at a rapid clip, but from a significant distance. As it approached the intersection, we could hear the driver yelling and cursing at the two girls. After stopping his car with its nose in the crosswalk, he continued gruesomely insulting and threatening them. Surprisingly to me, I found myself yelling back, "They have the right of way!" Because that's totally going to be persuasive to an enraged man who yells at young cute girls who are trying to cross the street in an empty crosswalk with a stop sign when his car is (though speeding) half a block away.

In order to continue the altercation, the man made a squealing right turn and drove a block the wrong way onto Bedford Avenue, a single-lane, one-way street. He hopped out of his car bellowing at me (and the girls) that I wasn't so tough now that he was right there, that he was going to kill all of us right now, etc. His erratic behavior was made more garishly bizarre by the fact that there were plenty of people walking by -- it was pretty early in the evening, around 8 o'clock.

Again, I was a conduit of nerdy girl-scout outrage, and found myself responding to his fairly credible threats by yelling his license plate at him while fumbling for my notebook, in which I wrote down said license plate (to remember it). I never actually said anything else to him, I just stood there angrily screeching his license plate at the top of my lungs. After writing it down, I didn't receive any new commands from the Justice Crusader who had unexpectedly taken over my body, so I just stuck with what I had and kept clearly yelling his license plate at him as he leaned into my face waving his arms and threatening to break, maim, and kill me and the two girls whose choice of crosswalk helped launch his manic ire.

He seemed baffled by my behavior (hell, so was I) and appeared to gradually recognize that a Scene was being caused, and that as a large, angry man looming over and loudly threatening to hurt, humiliate, and kill a fairly innocuous-looking girl, the onlookers were probably not on his side. Even if the girl looks like a certifiable weirdo, screaming "F1Z-5N83!!" over and over again. Here in New York, we don't kill people just for shouting weird stuff on the street. We kill them for their sneakers. Innocent-looking weird girl trumps belligerent fugly harassment man for public sympathy, so he suddenly lunged back to his car and resentfully executed a three-point turn before speeding away the right way up Bedford Avenue.

Sheesh, somebody should tell those Michiganian youngsters that using chants/cheers as a mnemonic device for license plates is sooooo 2003.