an old-fasioned party i’m a stranger in these par…
3590 days agoan old-fasioned party
i’m a stranger in these parts; i admit it. i try to fit in, try to pretend i’m familiar with the local customs and unofically sanctioned ways of showing joy. but some of the celebration that goes on here (cf. the lafayette oatmeal festival in the middle of last october) has had me a little perplexed. tonight, for example, i stepped out of play rehearsal into a beautiful evening. longmont was celebrating the second thusday in april (don’t you?) by burning several tires. oh, call me a sucker for a hoedown, i went right on over. a couple of others from the show came too, and it turned out to be a blast. when the tires went out, there were fireworks, and we all sat near the edge of this little pond to watch them. small-town fireworks, the kind Los Angeles might throw together if it had remembered the fourth of july at the last minute. oversized bottle rockets and those rainbow spinny things on the ground, clearly lighting up the island in the middle of the pond and the four guys with the lucky job of setting everything off. it must have been a hastily planned display, because there was no finale or anything, it just kind of slowly started to die off. right then though, a very public-spirited soul saved us all from anticlimax by driving a pickup truck into the pond.
i stood back for a minute, watching people run around trying to sort things out: some were soaking wet, some worried about the truck, a few gone all to pieces with shock. then i looked back at the truck, cab mostly out of the water, resting in the pond. the guy who’d driven it in was sitting on its roof, smoking a cigarette, calm as can be, about thirty feet from the island. the scene in general, but the juxtaposition in the duck pond in particular, had excellent feng shui.
