Dirty words

The good news about Folklife is that the weather was fantastic. Just about the best four days I could have hoped for. Unfortunately sales didn't follow. It was my second worst show ever. I can't blame the economy; the festival just wasn't a good fit for my type of work.

For example, I have never seen so many people eating out of trash cans. And not just eating, but relishing the hunt for half-eaten morsels of food. This was not about being poor and driven to the indignity of dumpster dining... this was a whole new attitude I admit I don't understand. There was pride in digging through the garbage, pulling out a treasure, and rubbing it on their faces.

It totally squicked me out. How bourgeois of me.

So in between the constant drumming, Peruvian flutes, saxophone, and main stage jamming, I felt like I was under aural attack. By themselves, these sounds can be beautiful, but together they make chaos, cacophony, noise. 36 hours of constant sound.

I have never been so happy for silence.

On Sunday night I closed my booth for the night and walked around the outskirts of the festival. At 8:30pm, the place was packed with young people, bouncing hacky sacks between their feet, strumming guitars, pounding the bottom of buckets with their hands, dancing barefoot in the grass. I admired their carefree attitude. It looked like an awful lot of fun.

I stopped at the beer garden and drank my Mirror Pond slowly, watching. Like the picket fence between us, a huge gulf has always separated me from that world and the one I've chosen. I do not let loose like that. I do not make instant friends with everyone I meet and find myself having crazy adventures with a reclaimed burrito. Nor have I ever worn a sign scrawled with the words, "Free Hugs."

And that's okay.

But maybe this weekend, just for fun, I will walk barefoot through the grass and see if it still feels just as good as I remember.