It was sort of fun, actually. Saturday was the first day it’s gotten above 90 degrees in Portland this year, and the heat has been so absent this summer that it felt exotic to sit there and sweat. Since I worked the first shift, I had to set up not only the table but the elevated awning that shades it. The awning was actually easy to set up – which was a pleasant surprise – but it did take two people. So I asked the woman in the next booth, who was selling jewelry. As I was folding the shirts so that they could be arranged in a cascade pattern with only the logos showing, the woman and I struck up a conversation. She said to me, for some reason, “I am disabled!” Her fiftieth birthday is coming up, she went on, and three days before that she’s going in for her Social Security hearing. Then we started talking about her business. I am always curious when I see people selling jewelry at festivals. Is that how they earn a living? Can you earn a living doing that? I could not stop staring at her breasts, which would not be ignored.
She told me many things about the custom jewelry business. The third most interesting is that everyone has a mother, so I had no excuse to not buy something from her. The second most interesting is that she doesn’t buy her own raw materials – a friend goes out and does that for her, and she works with whatever falls out of his bag. The most interesting thing is that she makes the bulk of her income from festivals, at which she camps and that she travels to and from on her “chopper.” I was drinking ginger ale with a lot of ice that I’d had to go inside to the bar to get, and she looked at my cup and told me that she always had admired people who go straight for the good stuff. We had a moment there, the two of us.
In addition to being pretty much trashed by 1:30 in the afternoon, most of the people at the brew fest were what I’d call trashy-ish. Here’s my take on it: They are the exact opposite of “the creatives” and other assortments of hipsters that seem to think they founded Portland and, at the same time, they are exactly what “the creatives” and the others want so desperately to emulate. It’s a gloriously mind fucky thing to behold, I think.
I watched people arrive who had clearly already started drinking, and I watched them try to cover up that fact as much as possible. I saw people buy three large containers of beer at a time even though there was no line. Many people came to the neighborhood association booth for the shade, and as they stood there they rambled incoherently about the weather, their cars, the bands that were coming. Most of them looked a little unhinged, I thought, a little desperate. The people in AA, who are wrong about many things, like to say that you should never be too comfortable in your sobriety, and while I can see the logic of that to a certain extent, I cannot even begin to imagine.
