Some 50-75 people rallied at the clock tower at 6p this afternoon, in celebration of birthday of progressive diner Saturn Cafe located at the opposite end of Pacific Ave downtown.

Wearing costumes and stilts, bearing banners, trumpets, drums, signs, or in 3 cases only bare female breasts, the march literally shut down Pacific Ave for 2 blocks at a time.

While originally billed as the Saturn Cafe birthday march, an assortment of the usual themes appeared to take center stage. Among them were:

.. the new downtown ordinances said to tighten the Santa Cruz Police Dept's grip on downtown against anyone who isn't a tourist, banning sitting, panhandling, street performance and sale of goods by non-business owners, bubble blowing, and sidewalk chalking,

..older citywide laws against sleeping and camping by the homeless,

.. and laws forbidding women to go topless in public.

Lead by the regular faces of Robert Norse and Becky Johnson on a portable megaphone, the group marched down Pacific Ave passing out fliers and chanting their causes to an amused crowd. Eventually they found their way to Saturn Cafe, then moved on to the Santa Cruz Police Dept itself where Norse spoke of the expense of the new $13M police station whose construction ran over budget by $6M, and finally ended on the steps of the Louden Nelson Community Center where the SCAN City Countil Candidates Forum was being held tonight.

After the crowd had marched only a few blocks from the clocktower, an SCPD car initially parked in the center of Pacific Ave ahead of them.

The officer walked up to the head of the march, and appeared to be telling Norse that his march was not allowed, to which Norse replied "You're violating my 1st amendment rights". The officer replied "No, Im not violating your rights." Norse recorded the conversation on his ever-present tape recorder, but it was soon drowned out as protesters calmly flooded around and past the car, chanting all the way. This scene, sans the verbal interaction, was repeated several times.

From this point on to the end of the march, SCPD appeared to adopt a tactic of blocking the march in front and back at every intersection, yet made no effort to stop marchers and soon was even departing intersections just before marchers would arrive.

Their intimidation efforts having failed, rather than escalate the conflict as they normally do when facing individuals or much smaller groups, police seemed content with doing traffic control to help the march move smoothly and uneventfully through and out of downtown.

Other than the initial contact between the officer and Robert Norse, no interaction with police was seen and the march was never stopped. A number of police in cars and on bicycles, 3-5 each, hovered in front of and behind the march at all times. Sgt. "Butchie" Baker, notorious for an iron fist in the downtown beat, was among the vehicular traffic controllers.

-Edison