Sunday, October 06, 2002
Over the last two days
Over the last two days I’ve had the opportunity to see two very different sides of the park. Today, at the free bluegrass festival, there were a lot of babies and tots and a fair number of dogs on leashes. People were unshaven but hygenic; t-shirts bore obscure slogans and memorialized unheard-of concerts. People were packed pretty close but gave each other a lot of room. The music wasn’t bad, and was sometimes quite good. We left before Chuck Prophet’s set, which is too bad, but as we left we forged against a steady tide of mellow freaks and cute young persons who all seemed to have their cultural houses in order. We can call this ‘population A.’
We hung with ‘population B’ yesterday at the very lovely Evil Queen’s picnic. It’s not like we were very far away or near a worse part of town. It’s the difference between Speedway Meadow and the Big Rec Fields - a dozen quiet residential blocks. But we encountered an entirely different crowd. First there was the old - not elderly - woman sprawled out on the grass, looking uncomfortable and unwashed; she scooted around a lot and after she left stray dogs kept checking out the patch of grass she’d occupied. Then the shirtless hebrephenic showed up, ranting and pacing and smacking the air, inventing and practicing a new martial art, screaming to heaven and rubbing himself against the turf like a dog off leash. Then there were the two gents with TB, relaxing on the sward, contemplatively hocking up thick puddles of lung and tar, so loud the ground seemed to shake and Brett had to start playing guitar to have something else to listen to. And the semi-nude semi-yogi, overtly tan with two dogs off-leash, parked in the shared outfields of two active softball diamonds, repeatedly performing preliminary warm-ups and assuring the frizbee player whose ass got nipped by the larger of his dogs that he shouldn’t concern himself, the dog just wanted to be friendly. At one point the hebrephrenic sauntered over to our festive encampment to borrow a lighter, for which he asked with a lengthy and confusing query; before we were able to help him out he’d begun to insult us as rich bitches. As he lit a tired stubby butt, he spat voluminously in the grass near us; after he returned the lighter to us he wandered into the bushes and started thrashing them with fallen boughs like quarterstaffs but he left us alone. A skater youth asked us later for a cig and Jared had him ready to pay two buck for a menthol but she gave it to him for free in the end. He admitted, ‘it’s a $2 buzz.’
The park is free. It’s worth the price, regardless which crowd you hang with.