Paranormal Pride in Asbury Park NJ with Adam Berry and Ben Berry, Chip Coffey and Kathy Kelly with Pissi Myles! May 31- June 2.
Paranormal Pride in Asbury Park NJ with Adam Berry and Ben Berry, Chip Coffey and Kathy Kelly with Pissi Myles! May 31- June 2.
Hey guys, it's Kathy and I am going to be talking to you. I'm in this little mini podcast about a couple of events that we have coming up. I've already talked to you a little bit about the Jersey Devil Festival, which remember is May 4th and I am also going to talk to you today about something called paranormal pride. So the way paranormal pride came around was I was in Provincetown in January of this year and I had, I had hooked up with the Adam and Ben Berry, you guys know Adam from a ghost hunters and also from kindred spirits. And his husband been, um, who was one of the founding members of the Provincetown paranormal research society, which they started, you know, like 12 years ago or whatever. Um, and we were just beaten, have a couple of drinks and just chatting and having fun. Um, and one of us, I honestly don't remember which one of us had kind of made the casual and funny comment that it was sometimes easier to come out as gay, than it was to come out as a paranormal list. And, you know, in no way, or either of us attempting to minimize how difficult it is sometimes to come out as Lgbtq or that some people in the world can't. but we were, we were, you know, making the comment that, you know, you can still get side, I'd looks and, and people still kind of tag you in and paint you with a certain brush if you're, if you're a person that's interested in the paranormal, they think they know something about you. and a lot of it is just this like, you know, intellectual elitism or just someone thinks you're a dope for believing something that they don't believe. and we were, we laughed about it. And, and um, and yet as the evening went on, I think both of us thought, well, you know, there's something to that, there's something to um, to being comfortable doing something that you love. And out of that grew this idea for paranormal pride. One of the other reasons was on some of the many events that I've hosted and some of the many events that, um, that I've attended specifically for Adam, um, I have noticed that there are definitely members of the Lgbtq community who attend and yet they never seem as comfortable or as fully engaged as other members do. And part of that is because it's, it's hard to be the only, you know, LGBTQ person in a room still. And it doesn't matter if everybody in that room doesn't care about you or doesn't care about your status as a member of that community. You do, you grow up hyper aware of who you are in comparison to other people. And so we thought that this was a really great opportunity for, um, for us to host something completely unique. And for those of you who don't know, and for those of you who just don't care, um, this is the 50th anniversary of pride and there are still lots of people who don't understand why we need pride and there are still lots of people who, you know, don't care about it and that's fine. Um, but there are still lots of people who really do need it and really do need to be invited into our community. And I'm held up and, and embraced and we thought, wow, you know, this is a great opportunity for us to put the two things that are really important to us together and have a great fun weekend with it. So I don't want anyone to think that this is a political statement or some kind of you know, some kind of a huge you know, huge moment are huge, huge statement about who we are. It's really just inviting some friends over, um, to do what they love and an environment that they complete 100% comfortable with themselves and with the people around them. So does that mean that you have to be gay or you have to be trans and you have to be by, or you have to be questioning or you have to be, you know, anything, any one of the letters in the, in the Lgbtq monitor the answer? No, you just have to be a supporter of that community and that means that you can be an ally one of the awesome things about the community is that once you're a member of it, it's your family. When I was, when I was younger and kind of struggling with who I was and where I would fit in the world, um, people used to use code and code was if you wanted to know if somebody was okay to be out with, if, if you wanted to know, if you had to change your pronouns or, or hide who you were, um, you would say, hey, is, is he family? Is she family? And it was code for saying, is she one of us? Is She okay with us? Just, is he, um, is he an ally? Is, is, am I safe with this person? And that's what we're doing here. Um, as we park is a unique place in that it is completely and utterly haunted and has this amazing past and is also culturally diverse and completely supportive of the Lgbtq community. Um, it's also the home for Jersey pride and it just so happens to fall on the first weekend in June. So Adam and I have gotten together with Ben and chip coffee and pissy miles who's a great drag queen. and we have created an amazing weekend and you can purchase a ticket by going to www.paranormalpride.com. You can visit us on Facebook or go to the website. Um, but a couple of things that we're going to be doing is on Friday night we have a meet and greet where you can meet at, um, uh, Ben, myself, chip coffee. and it's an open bar with some light fare at the Berkeley Ocean Front Hotel, which is about, well, I don't know, 500 feet from the boardwalk in Asbury Park. Um, and it is within spitting distance of the first place that we're going to be allowed to get back behind the scenes and started investigating. And that is the paramount theater. And if you're not familiar with the paramount theater, it is one of the gems of the United States. It is an absolute phenomenal location both for historical reasons and because it is incredibly active, it's not a place that the public is often invited in. I've done a couple of investigations there with amazing results. and we're going to go real old school with it. We're going to go real low key so that people can experience it the way that the people who work there experience it and we'll be doing that on Friday night. Saturday we have a whole slew of events, a scheduled that you'll be able to participate in at your level of interest. You can also participate in some of the pride events in town. Um, but we have ghost tours and um, we have uh, the paranormal museum, we have readings, we have,lectures. Chip coffee's going to be doing his famous coffee talk. you can also upgrade your ticket to get a gallery reading with a chip. You can also come see one of Adam's favorite,, Lgbtq flix and the showroom, and that's going to be included in your ticket. And then also we have a, a full investigation at the Berkeley Ocean Front. Now the cool thing about the Berkeley Ocean front is it, first of all, it's built in the shape of an ax. Um, so it's kind of interesting and difficult in a good way to move around and you really have to, you have to consciously figure out where you are. But it's a history is wild. It was built as the premiere luxury resort in Asbury in the 1920s, and you can absolutely tell that as you approach it, but it's a really ominous looking building and its position where it is at. The North end of the boardwalk is very,it's very commanding and very domineering. it's also was in the 1940s. It was used as a training for, naval officers. And so there was a lot of interesting, different things that happen there, but because it was a resort town, it's been home to an inordinate number of suicides. It also has been home to during the 1980s, it kind of fell into disrepair, but it was the only continuously operating hotel in Asbury Park and there's some dark and twisted things that happen there. But something really cool happened there as well. It was owned by Johnny Cash. Um, so for the first time ever, the Berkeley Ocean front is allowing us to investigate it. We do have something called the suicide suite that we've secured, which is the site of multiple suicides. I'm not going to tell you the number because I don't want to really,, I don't want to ruin the reputation of the room, but when you get there we'll talk about it. in addition to that, we have a block of rooms that are in the most active area and those we have a discount code for which you can get on the website. and then on Saturday night after we finished that up, we're also going to go out and have some fun at one of the local watering, watering holes and Asbury Park because Sunday is pride and we start pride at nine 30 in the morning with a drag brunch with pissy miles. And the drag brunch goes on until about 1130 when we'd go and we line up for the parade. You guys are going to be walking in the parade. We're going to hopefully make it the loudest rowdy as part of the parade, right behind our patty hearse, which is paranormals hers. Um, and we're gonna March in the parade. And then we're going to enjoy pride. Pride in Asbury Park is not just a parade, it's a full festival down at Bradley Park and you guys will get into that and we'll have a ton of fun there too. So listen, I, I, I hope you, um, you know, hope you check it out. I hope you understand what we're doing and if you have any questions, you can always reach out to me on Facebook. You can always send me an email@kathywithakatparanormalbooksandj.com and I am going to be talking to you guys about it for the next month or so. So I'm super excited. Thanks for listening.