Did You Hear About The Detroit Money Drop?
It is very hot where I live. Perhaps it is very hot where you live, too, which would not be altogether surprising. It is, in fact, July. It is hot most places in this hemisphere right now. Sometimes it’s the kind of hot where you look out your window and see the little wavy lines of Satan’s own breath rising off the ground and hovering like a sweaty cloud above the sidewalk and you say to yourself, “No, thank you. I will stay inside where the air conditioner is.” I understand this impulse. It’s probably the smart way to go.
But keep one thing in mind this summer: if you do stay inside, you might miss out on the opportunity to acquire thousands of dollars in cash that have been dropped from a helicopter during the funeral of a local car wash owner.
That’s exactly what happened recently in Detroit.
Witnesses said a helicopter hovering in the area of Gratiot Avenue and Conner Street dropped thousands of dollars in cash onto the pedestrians below, bringing a sudden and surreal burst of joy to a hot Friday afternoon in east Detroit.
The background here looks something like this, pieced together from a handful of reports on the scene…
A Detroit man named Darrell “Plant” Thomas passed away a few weeks ago. He owned a car wash and loved to give back to the community. His funeral was apparently quite the event, with people from all over the area coming to pay their respects to a man they admired. And it turned out he wasn’t done giving back to the community, because his final wish, carried out by his two sons, was to have a helicopter hover over the funeral home and drop rose petals and $5000 in cash out the open door and onto the neighborhood below.
This is, to be very clear, awesome. And not even something I knew you could do. Maybe you can’t do it, actually, because in another report on it all we learn that Darrell’s sons gave the police a heads up about the rose petals, but… not so much about the cash.
While the police were informed about the plan to drop rose petals, they were not aware that money would also be released.
And this is where I’m sure some of you are tempted to say something like, “But Brian, think about how dangerous this could be. What if a riot broke out over the fluttering bills from the heavens and someone got hurt?” Well, I have two responses to this:
- If we’re looking at this on balance, I’m giving more weight to “the joy and whimsy of money being thrown out of a helicopter in broad daylight with little to no advance warning as the last wishes of a beloved local businessman” than “something might go wrong”
- Shut uppppppppppp
The CBS affiliate in Detroit reported on the story and rounded up some amateur recordings from the scene. Do you wanna see a bunch of money get thrown out of a helicopter? Of course you do. Everybody does.
This is great. I love it very much. I love that it happened. It means that now, every time I see a helicopter in the sky for the rest of my entire life, a little voice in my head is going to say “… they throwing money out of that thing?” There is now officially a non-zero chance that this is what’s happening. It’s fun to live in a world where that’s a possibility.
Really, after a lot of thought, the only way I could like this story more is if one of the eyewitnesses the news interviewed about it had a cool name. Something awesome, like Frank Swords or Vikki Nightshade. Something like th-
Lisa Knife, an employee at the nearby Airport Express Lube & Service, 10490 Gratiot, estimated that thousands of dollars were tossed from the chopper. She herself didn't run toward the falling dollar bills, but instead watched, taking in the surreal scene.
LISA KNIFE?
LISA KNIFE!
WHAT DID LISA KNIFE SAY???
"There was no fighting, none of that," she said. "It was really beautiful."
In conclusion:
- This is cool
- It is very satisfying that the doom-and-gloom person I invented in my head who was worried about the safety of a random money shower was promptly disproven by a woman named Lisa Knife
- I want to throw money out of a helicopter
I know it’s hot outside. But try to get out for a little if you can. Especially if you hear a helicopter nearby. You never know, you know?
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Okay, that’s it for this week. Please subscribe and share and throw some money out of a chopper.
