The advantage of being a hermit is, it makes me a cheap date, cause it doesn’t take much to feed me, socially speaking, these days. Today was practically epic.
Let me back up.
The first Friday of every month around here is Gallery Walk: stores stay open later and everyone puts art up and hopes that maybe they’ll sell something. Anything. Combine that with our own version of the Running of the Bulls (the Strolling of the Heifers parade) the first Saturday in June, and you have epic crowd conditions for little old Vermont.
Naturally, I signed up for my member hours at the food coop this afternoon, so I could siphon off the general buzz in the air and add it to my energetic fuel tank for the next few weeks. (I do grocery bagging. It’s an art unto myself. It’s my bliss. A typical two hour shift generally yields at least a handful of customers truly stunned by my epic bagging prowess.)
By the time Kevin came to fetch me at the end of my shift, it was time to head to Our Hero Michael’s kid’s baseball game. (Michael = installed our kitchen, installed our deck, that Michael.) Ian rocked the house. Insert impressive baseball factoids here: he scored the first run. He’s his team’s pitcher: we stayed for four batters and he struck three of ‘em out.
Perhaps my favorite part was overhearing a little kid behind me in the stands react to something out on the field by exclaiming “holy shit!” Kevin and I both turned to each other: did he just say what I think he just said? Yep, he sure did.
We headed back into town for some dinner at Fireworks. We lucked out and immediately got the last of the first shift of tables – typically, there’s a 45 minute wait, particularly on a Gallery Walk night. Brick oven pizza heaven.
And from there, we entered the mayhem that is Brattleboro: Main Street was closed to traffic and the whole street was just packed with people. You gotta understand, this is a part of the country where four cars in front of you is an annoying traffic jam.
Our first entertainer of the evening, a hula-hooping violinist, of course.
No sooner will the street be covered in chalk art than the heifers will be pooping on it tomorrow.
Waaaghhh! Who’s that hugging me from behind? Ah! It’s Jonathan, one of our builders from last summer. By the time the evening was through, we would run into his business partner Steve, as well as Other Steve on the crew (the guy with the '59 Austin Healey Sprite.). Plus we saw crew member Mike in the crowd as well.
We ran into the friend who lured Kevin into Fantasy Baseball.
And then we followed – along with a couple hundred other people – this fabulous band around. The trombone player in the middle of this picture is the guy who started a movement around here in local town meetings to impeach Bush. He plays a mean trombone.
They have their own band clown…
Crazy platform shoe lady got her groove on. See the baby standing just to her left? He was having a blast.
Kevin may look all serious here, but he is also having a blast, tapping away with the several drummers/percussionists in this band – one of whom is a neighbor of ours.
We ran into friends here and hung out for a good while.
Crazy silver-painted lady.
We contemplated trying out hula hooping ourselves, but why would we suddenly figure it now when we’ve been hula hoop failures our whole entire lives?
We checked out a display of art glass by another friend…ran into lots MORE friends…and finally called it a night. Stay tuned for cow pictures tomorrow…
No comments:
Post a Comment