Susannah Bryan, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Sun, October 31, 2021, 3:03 PM·3 min read
The free speech witch must have been watching over Cat Uden Saturday night.
Uden, the activist warned by police not to wear a condo costume to the city’s Halloween block party, dared to wear it anyway.
To her relief, she and six friends in similar costumes were not told they had to leave the party. No one spent the night behind bars. And one woman toting a “No Condo” sign says she got a hug from a police sergeant.
But Uden was ready, just in case. “My husband was at home waiting for my one phone call,” she said. “He said he would bail my friends out, too.”
Uden’s costume controversy, a story first told by the South Florida Sun Sentinel, has sparked a slew of headlines from news outlets across the country, including Newsweek and Forbes.
“When I woke up this morning it looked like I was in every newspaper in the nation,” she said Sunday.
In recent months, Uden has emerged as a fierce critic of the Related Group’s plan to build a 30-story condo on taxpayer-owned beachfront land 13 blocks south of Hollywood Boulevard.
She’s held two protests so far, one in September at City Hall and one in mid-October on the 4-acre beachfront parcel the developer hopes to build on. She got permits for both.
Uden didn’t think she’d need a permit to show up at a public block party in a condo costume.
But on Wednesday, Uden says she got a chilling call from a police lieutenant who told her she needed a permit to wear the costume or even tell anyone why she was wearing it.
A police spokeswoman confirmed that if Uden attended the event and led an organized protest, she would be given a warning and asked to leave. If she refused, she could be arrested and face a fine up to $500 or 60 days in jail. The spokeswoman didn’t respond when asked how the city defined an organized protest.
“I was surprised the city doubled down and said if I didn’t leave it could be a fine or jail,” Uden said. “It was just supposed to be a fun condo costume.”
On Saturday, Uden and her costumed friends danced and shimmied the night away in full view of police officers.
“We had a little conga line,” she said. “We danced past the police, the SWAT team and two city commissioners.”
Uden plans to hang onto the condo costume and wear it to the next protest.
“We are going to hang on to them in case we have a demonstration in the future,” she said.
On Sunday morning, she was out on the ocean on her paddleboard in a different costume. For her Halloween paddle, she ditched the boxy condo look for a black bikini and witch hat.
On Twitter, she posted a photo of her silhouette with the tagline: “Good witch of the east.”
Susannah Bryan can be reached at sbryan@sunsentinel.com or on Twitter @Susannah_Bryan
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