Monday, June 13, 2005
Patron of the Arts
This weekend was the Old Town Art Fair, which meant that my normally quiet neighborhood was once again filled with tipsy trophy wives, sociopathic funnel cake venders, and dumpy middle-aged men willing to kill for a parking spot. The Art Fair is the only place I know of where you can see a Hopper-lite painting by a clinically depressed man in a beret and a trust-fund kid in a backwards white cap vomiting in a trash bin within moments of one another; if the two should ever meet, I think the complications could be exceedingly sexy.
For me the Art Fair this year was an amalgam of parties, sunburn, and for some gawdawful reason, Jim Beam. I spent easily ten hours straight on my feet, complimenting people’s decor, grazing on tostito shards and suspiciously lukewarm spinach dip, shouting incomprehensible directions into my cell phone, wondering if it was the actual Chumbawumba playing "Tubthumping" down the street, and, at some point, apparently earning some beads. I’m not really sure where they entered the picture, but I think we should all just agree to pretend I bought them at a store called "Mardi Gras Etcetera."
My favorite moment, however, has to be when my friend decided that the best route for me to walk him home was through several darkened parking lots, ominous-looking back alleys, and miscellaneous yards. As he perched precariously atop some sort of heating and cooling unit, attempting to scale a fence and continue our journey, a disembodied voice from a nearby house threatened to call the police. This led to a vigorous debate on the subject of who was mean, with a brief digression as to whether it was in fact late at night or not. No charges ever actually resulted, but believe me, if it’s a crime to be both superathletic and inordinately articulate, we were guilty as charged.
This weekend was the Old Town Art Fair, which meant that my normally quiet neighborhood was once again filled with tipsy trophy wives, sociopathic funnel cake venders, and dumpy middle-aged men willing to kill for a parking spot. The Art Fair is the only place I know of where you can see a Hopper-lite painting by a clinically depressed man in a beret and a trust-fund kid in a backwards white cap vomiting in a trash bin within moments of one another; if the two should ever meet, I think the complications could be exceedingly sexy.
For me the Art Fair this year was an amalgam of parties, sunburn, and for some gawdawful reason, Jim Beam. I spent easily ten hours straight on my feet, complimenting people’s decor, grazing on tostito shards and suspiciously lukewarm spinach dip, shouting incomprehensible directions into my cell phone, wondering if it was the actual Chumbawumba playing "Tubthumping" down the street, and, at some point, apparently earning some beads. I’m not really sure where they entered the picture, but I think we should all just agree to pretend I bought them at a store called "Mardi Gras Etcetera."
My favorite moment, however, has to be when my friend decided that the best route for me to walk him home was through several darkened parking lots, ominous-looking back alleys, and miscellaneous yards. As he perched precariously atop some sort of heating and cooling unit, attempting to scale a fence and continue our journey, a disembodied voice from a nearby house threatened to call the police. This led to a vigorous debate on the subject of who was mean, with a brief digression as to whether it was in fact late at night or not. No charges ever actually resulted, but believe me, if it’s a crime to be both superathletic and inordinately articulate, we were guilty as charged.
