Alcohol, a headline in The
Alcohol, a headline in The Ann Arbor News announces, “fuels [the] U-M party scene.”
The reporter describes the scene outside a fraternity house with breathless prose fit for a Newsweek article whose title is a vaguely alarming question in which the words “YOUR Kids” feature prominently. A group of women go to a fraternity party, “looking for a good time. The doorman lets them in.” These two sentences form their own paragraph.
This party took place at 10 p.m. on a Saturday, when “most of Ann Arbor has gone to bed.” But there were at least some townies who didn’t mind - two 26-year-old “party watchers” who have never been affiliated with the university but come out to “watch the kids,” especially the “Britney Spearses and Christina Aguileras.”
The News runs with another article about the “party patrol” and their heroic efforts to ticket public drinkers, including a 27-year-old man drinking a beer on the lawn of a house.
“Hammer them as many times as you can,” Sgt. James Baird told the officers as they prepared to begin their enforcement effort at 10 p.m. Behind him in the briefing room, the phrase “Hammer Time” was written on a dry erase board.
Hey, we’ve got a tip for them - on some Saturdays around South Main, you can sometimes see people sitting by their cars, drinking in plain view in the middle of the day. The practice is so widespread that it even has a name: “tailgating.”