Nature Lovers in Central Park

Huh. It seems like people are celebrating 150 years of Central Park by going crazy in it: On the heels on Monday's incident where two women decided to swim in the reservoir, two men staged a protest, climbing a 55 foot tree, had oral sex, and stayed up there for four hours, from 4 in the afternoon till 8 at night. The Times description of the situation says it all: "The two people, identified by the police as a 32-year-old man with feminine breasts and a 17-year-old boy, shouted threats at rescue workers and drank soft drinks." When the transsexual threatened to jump, rescue workers brought cherrypickers and an airbag at the base of the tree. But why they were in the tree is unclear: Some passerbys said the couple were upset their relationship wasn't accepted by their family, some were told they were protesting a Daily News article, the Post noted "Police hostage negotiators recorded their demands as one Diet Vanilla Pepsi." The couple were taken in for psychiatric evaluation; they weren't charged yet, but may face indecent exposure counts.

Some more reaction:
- Long Island City resident Brian Mallard told the Post, "We thought it was an ecological statement for Earth Day, but it's just transvestites."
- Austrailian tourist Elise Gaillard told the Daily News, "We don't get this back home. Crazy Americans."
- One cop said, "It's a treesome."
- Swiss tourist Katerine Usvitsky told the Times, "I live in Switzerland, which is uneventful. Things like this don't happen there."

Gothamist is glad that second-graders at P.S. 234, whose curriculum focuses on learning about Central Park, weren't there or else their teachers would have had a doozy of a time explaining this.