A friend got free tickets to see a play that was the hit of the San Francisco Fringe Festival. It was supposed to be an absurdist musical, and the reviews said it was really funny. It wasn't all that amusing and it wasn't that great, but at least we didn't pay for it. The woman who is the owner of the theater was sitting next us, and I'm not even sure if she liked the play because she hardly laughed.

It's probably one of those plays that are good if you see it when the theatre is full, and everyone is a little rowdy and a little drunk. You end up laughing and enjoying it, only because everyone around is going crazy over it and so you get into it so you don't feel left out. It's like theater peer pressure. If everybody else is laughing, it must be funny right?

Then we went to Original Joe's to have some dinner. The food is italian dinner and old fashioned, but for a cheap price they serve you huge portions of food so you always feel like you've got your money's worth by eating there because you have enough for a meal for the next day.

As we were leaving the restaurant and turning on Eddy Street, we see these police cars on full siren driving down the street. Then we saw two cops running down the street. It was like a scene out of "Cops", and automatically I heard the "Cops" theme song in my head. "Bad boys. what you gonna do, what you gonna do when then come for you."

The theater and restaurant are in the bad part of town called the "Tenderloin". It's the red light district with hookers, seedy hotels, drug dealers galore, and assorted junkies and freaks hanging out on the street.

My friend didn't want to walk down Eddy, so we headed down Taylor and the scene there looked dicey as well. Then I suggested we go up a block to avoid the police melee. and she said no because the next street up was even worse because of the drug dealers.

Of course secretly, I wanted to go walk down Eddy Street and watch the cops do their thing because whenever I see cops on the street arresting people it makes me feel like I'm in a movie or in a police crime drama show on TV. I told my friend that the cops running like that made me feel like I was in a movie, and she said it wouldn't be a movie if we got caught in the crossfire of a gun battle.

But Eddy was the only safest street to walk through that night, so we waited to see what the police would do. There were four cop cars lined up on the left side of the street with their lights flashing, and the two cops whom we saw running down the street, were now returning in the direction they had come from.

So we cautiously proceeded down the street trying to be hyper alert for gun sightings and or gun shots. When we passed the two cops, I heard one of them say it was a code 4.

I was wondering if code 4 was MDK, or murder-death-kill, and then I annoyed my friend because I started chanting murder-death-kill, murder-death-kill. Then we saw two different cops running up the street, but by then we were a block away from Union Square and anxious to get home.

It's so weird to get back to the cable car turnaround at Union Square thinking there might a possible police shootout two to three blocks away. My friend talked about tourists getting lost and ending up in the Tenderloin. Will they feel like they're in an episode of "Cops", or maybe a movie or a police crime drama tv show?