Tacoma: Alley crowd, cops and exploding neon

By Bobble Tiki on August 22, 2010

WHEN GALEN MCCARTY TURNER JUMPS ON HIS BIKE, THINGS HAPPEN >>>

When Bobble Tiki was a kid he would ride his bike over empty soda cans so they caught on the tops of the tires, making a buzzing noise nothing at all like a motorcycle, but to a 10-year-old tiki, Bobble Tiki might as well have put glasspacks on his Huffy.  Some of those same nutty kids have graduated from Pepsi cans to ... jumping their bike through neon tubing.

As promised, Tacoman Galen McCarty Turner jumped his bicycle through neon tubing last night, just as Weekly Volcano editor Matt Driscoll previewed in his Prefunk column Friday. What Driscoll left out was that the alley would be packed with more than a hundred people in an atmosphere that felt like a high school keg party, that the Tacoma Police force would arrive as the neon tubing was about to be lit, that Patricia Lecy-Davis would convince the police to slow their walk toward Turner to a crawl so that the Tacoma daredevil could skip his pre-jump ritual and jump his bicycle through the tubing before the event was shut down.

And that's exactly what happened. The crowd cheered Turner on as he skipped the pre-jump theatrics (fortunately not skipping the steps where he lights the sparklers on his helmet and bike) and went right for the gusto before the police cleared the alley.

It was spectacular, to say the least.

Check out the few photos we snapped of the event in our Photo Hot Spot.