Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts
By Alyce Wilson
On the way back to the Philadelphia Folk Festival yesterday, I felt a sharp pain in my back. What on earth.....?
I leaned forward. "Ow!" I said. "See what it is! Quick!"
My sister told me it was a yellow jacket. "Hold still." She tried to shoo it away, but it wouldn't be shooed. "Pull over."
I pulled over into a grocery store parking lot and we both jumped out of the truck.
"I think you stunned it," she said. It was sitting on the seat, looking dazed. I handed her a paper bag, and she attempted to squish it, but it was still alive. We shrieked. It had fallen onto the floor of my truck. She ground it down with her shoe.
"I hate to do it, but with yellowjackets, sometimes you just have to kill them," she said. "Or they'll keep stinging you."
"Thanks," I said. My sister, my hero.
We'd already bought suntan lotion (SPF 45, for the Wilson fair skin), and she smoothed a little on the irritated area. I told myself that bee stings are supposed to be good for you, so maybe yellow jacket stings were, too.
This time we'd arrived in time to catch some of the afternoon acts. We'd bought four cans of premium beer on the way there and had it in a little purple thermal bag I had, which was apparently not designed for holding ice. It dripped all over my leg.
When the Magic Bus (zoombah!) got us to the festival grounds, we bought some iced cappuccinos. The plan was to drink them and then use the cups for the beer. Bees kept following us, and everyone must have thought we were mad as we shrieked and ran from them.
We wandered around until we found some decent music. It was Plena Libre again, jamming with Xavier Rudd and Led Kaapana on one of the smaller stages. But the shade was way off to the side, and we were already needing some shade. A lot of families were over there, so we were surreptitious about pouring the beer into the cups. (The tickets said "no alcohol" on the back, in quotation marks, along with "no drugs" and "no fireworks" and "no recording" — and given that after dark the smell of pot wafted through the crowd, lights blinked on tall microphones and yes, even a lone firework shot up from the middle of the crowd, I can see why all the rules are in quotation marks.)
We couldn't sit still for the next act, Terry Hendrix, especially when she started singing a song about public radio. So we wandered into Dulcimer Grove. There, we saw the Give and Take Jugglers perform. They were good, using a tall unicycle and even flaming batons. I told my sister about the one time I'd fell for a guy just because he could juggle, until I discovered that, aside from juggling, he was pretty boring.
Wondering further, we found Plena Libre, performing on the Camp Stage. We got there just in time to join in with some audience hand motions. It was liberating. Plena Liberating. Our friend from stage college came up, this time with her curly red hair tucked under a camo hat. She'd painted some flowers on her arm in henna. She gave us huge hugs and danced wildly next to us, apparently losing her paint brush in the process: we couldn't find it afterwards, no matter how hard we looked.
The concert was over too fast. A guy in an olive and blue tie dye came up and asked if he could look at our program book. I told him sure. We asked him if anything good was coming up. He said he had to look at the program book to see. After that, he kind of shrugged but thanked us.
"Do you like The Waifs?" he asked, holding out a CD.
"Sure," I said, having never heard of the Waifs before. He gave it to me. It was a homemade CD, probably recorded from the audience. In sharpie, it's marked "The Waifs Tellumondo, CO 6/20/03." We're listening to it now. It's a folk-rock sort of ensemble, with a female vocalist. A little bit like 10,000 Maniacs meets The Indigo Girls.
The heat was getting to us (or the beer?) but we crashed the reserved seating section near the Main Stage when it came time for Alison Brown. She's a banjo player and we liked her performance well enough, but liked her hair better, in it's blond sleek bob. We gave her a half smile and her hair a smiley.
Then was Mary Chapin Carpenter. Even though we still wanted to run back and get some food, we decided we had to stick around to see what this big name folkie would do. We might as well have left. She sang tepid, somewhat poppy folk that reminded us of Melissa Etheridge without the spark. After a few songs, we slipped away, agreeing that if she just wrote better songs, she'd be worth listening to. I think we gave her a neutral face— neither smiley nor frown.
Her
picture in the program book didn't look anything like the way she looks
today. It must have been from several years ago. Or several decades ago.
This was a common issue with pictures in the program book. We began to wonder whether it was the fault of the musicians or whether the folk festival had photos on file they just used every year without updating them.
We filled out surveys today, giving feedback on the festival. We had a few suggestions, one of the key ones being get rid of the reserved seating and open up the area near the stage for dancing. It was beginning to irritate us that such a large, fenced in area was made off limits. And the taped off aisles were a good idea, but the volunteers swooping down on you and forcing you to move if you stopped for, say, two seconds to look for a place to sit, that was bad juju, too.
We began to wonder if the people who'd started the festival over 40 years ago had forgotten what it felt like to just want to roam and dance and have fun, rather than sit in a camp chair with an uninterrupted view of the stage and a sun umbrella.
But it's not like that spirit is gone. There were plenty of freaks to be seen, especially at night. One guy made a huge sculpture out of green neon necklaces, which looked like a huge abstract monkey with a pile of bushy hair. We called him Monkey Man.
And then there was Father Time, with red and blue flashing buttons in his long white beard. And, I kid you not, Santa Claus.
Because our doggies were at home, we drove back before the evening concert to grab some dinner and let them out. We stopped at a sub shop near me that, despite a bit of an extra drive, was worth it in terms of prize and amount of food. My sister and I got into a conversation about how the term "hoagies" came about. I told her they were originally called "hoggies" because they were so big. I read that somewhere.
It was dark by the time we got back, and Eddie from Ohio was just beginning. We poured ourselves our second beers and found a place to sit. Eddie from Ohio just wasn't doing it for us, especially when they began to sing some weak-kneed gospel. "Ohio sucks," I said.
But next was the Holmes Brothers. We'd had high hopes for them, since they were billed as "gospel-drenched soul music." But they, too, were a little heavy on the gospel. By now, night had fallen and my sister was getting cold. She didn't have a sweatshirt with her, like I did. We walked around to try to get warm.
More iced cappuccinos at this point were probably a bad idea.
It would have been better if the Holmes had been more danceable, but they weren't. Except for a song or two, and we were busy drinking our cappuccinos and missed them.
Next up was Odetta, legend of folk. Again, high hopes thwarted. She carried herself proudly and liked to talk for long ages into the mike, in a soft voice that only allowed us to hear every few words. I swear, during one ramble, she mentioned "penicillin" and "knocking people up" and then... launched into a gospel song.
She did a long medley around the song "I'm going to let it shine." It was like Vacation Bible School with an African headdress.
We couldn't take it any longer, so we wandered the craft section. By this time, I'd taken pity on my sister and offered to buy her a long-sleeved shirt or sweatshirt. All of the nice ones in the craft section were above my price range, so it was back to the Folk Festival merchandise tent. There, we managed to grab a pale blue hoodie, which was quite a trick given all the other people with the same idea.
Back outside, we could see our breath.
But finally, there was a ray of light. To be specific, BeauSoliel avec Michael Doucet. They were a good old zydeco band and just what the spirit needed. Parfait. We danced around, waving around the glow-in-the-dark necklaces we'd bought. I'd wrapped mine around my wrists and she around her ankle.
"You're all about the arms right now," my sister observed about my dancing. "And I'm doing the fancy footwork."
It reminded me of the girl we'd seen clogging the previous night to a Celtic rock band, The Tempest. I swear she was on fast forward.
On the way back to the parking lot, later, I drew a couple symbols on the fogged up window. Peace and Love.
"And anarchy," my sister said. "This festival needs a little anarchy."
So I drew that, too. Peace and Love and Anarchy.
More
Folk Festival Fun:
August 23, 2003 - Folkfest Fun
August 25, 2003 - Fabulous DiFranco
Moral:
It's never too late to be young.
Copyright
2003 by Alyce Wilson
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