So, I was at an anime festival with my daughters, and was surrounded by people with wings, horns, cat ears, tails, and swords of all shapes and sizes. Girls were dressed as boys, and boys were dressed as girls. Some girls were barely dressed at all, and me, being a bit advanced in age, felt ill at ease with all the young sexuality around me.

There was this one pair of girls, though, looking in their mid twenties … one was dressed up as a light angel, the other a dark angel. The dark angel had the most stunningly beautiful eyes and a perfectly feminine face. She was gorgeous.

Well, it turns out my older daughter knows them, and so I remarked about how pretty the dark angel was.

My daughter bursts out laughing. She tells me, “Uh, that’s the light angel’s boyfriend.”

“Excuse me?!”

“Yeah, dad. That’s a boy.”

“No way!”

Well, he was in fact a boy. And I was freaked out. So I did what any normal freaked-out gender-confused dad would do — I headed for the bar.

They had several beers on tap, but the one that caught my eye and set me craving was the Fat Tire Amber Ale. I had four in a row.

Yes, that picture up there is an actual cell phone photo of the first of the four. And since I didn’t have anything to keep notes on, I used my phone to call in a review to my own voice mail:

“It’s a beautiful amber color,” my voice mail says, “with a nice frothy head. Decent lacing. First sip is very smooth, with not much in the way of hops but a very dominant and satisfying caramel malt flavor. It’s really good. I’m going to keep them coming.” Of course I mention nothing in the voice mail about why I’m in such a hurry to drink the beer.

Sitting to my right, looking at me like I were nuts for talking about beer into my cell phone, sat Frank the Rabbit. I don’t exactly know what Frank was doing there, as he’s not an anime character. He’s the time travelling portent of doom from the movie Donnie Darko.

“So how do you drink your beer with that mask on?” I asked him.

“With a straw,” he answered, and produced one. But he was not a he … he was a she. Or at least, her voice sounded feminine. She inserted the straw and sucked on her beer like some giant mutant mosquito.

Well … that’s just weird, I thought to myself.

Nobody drinks beer through a straw.

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