The monthly street festival in our mill town is held on the third Thursday of each summer month. It is probably one of the very best things about living in this oddball town. We were eager to visit the Puerto Rican church ladies tent. We bought a plate of 4 empanadas and another combo plate: pork, taco and rice with pigeon peas. Rather than sit on the curb, or try to manage standing up and eating, we went to the nearby beer garden.I bought a wooden nickel, showed my identification, got a wrist band, and finally secured a cold beer. We sat listening to a local, three-piece mariachi band. The weather was spectacular: the sky was blue (although the buzzards always seem to be circling) and the air had suddenly lost the cold damp chill of the previous few days. Three amigos resplendent in black suits and somberos facing off against a pasty swarm of stiff New Englanders. At first there were only few of us listening but the crowd grew to about a hundred by the time our food and drink were gone.
The musicians were really good and for a moment I contemplated how to organize a conference such that the evening artist would expand beyond our tradition of poetry (indigenous music as craft?). I was pulled out of my reverie by the four little white girls, maybe 3 to 4 years old, dancing with abandon. They were dressed in combinations of pink, light green and baby blue outfits. The mostly hopped as individuals or held hands in pairs and spun about. Javier showed up and did his best to recruit a partner. He was not especially lucky and we saw him throw his hands up at one point as if to say, "Hey, chicas! Don't you have heard about the Latin man?!" When one girl did begin to spin with him, it was too fast for his taste so he returned to bouncing on his own.
A dad arrived with pizza slices and the dancing took a new twist. The girls would run a couple of laps around the concrete pad and then peel off to take a bite from an upside-down pepperoni slice. Then, back into the circuit. It was an imaginative blend of interpretive dance and auto racing: moving to music interrupted with refueling stops. When my partner demonstrated that she could sing along to "Ring of Fire" then it all just became too weird. I stood up and proposed we begin a search for ice cream. And now our summer has unofficially begun.
