Bluesfest was a blast yesterday, despite the rain and a serious case of Bluesfest Fatigue. A lot of people I talked to are happy today’s the last day. We love Bluesfest, but we’re burning out.
The best performance of the day was Danny Michel. I’ve never seen him before, and he’s terrific, definitely worth standing in the rain for. His songs are wonderful, he’s got a great rapport with his audience, and I loved how he slipped in a bit of the Spiderman theme song.
A1-Great suggested I’ve perhaps devoted a bit too much space to the Porta-Potties, but I’m not quite done yet. I finally used one of my P-Mates at the special P-Mate Porta-Potty with the incense and candles, and it was every bit as nice as it sounds.
Laurie, the P-Mate Demo Woman, introduced me to Larry, who is apparently the REAL North American P-Mate Distributor. According to them, Karen Diamond, the woman who left a comment on this blog identifying herself as the North American P-Mate Distributor, is an imposter!
Anyway, in my brief five-minute conversation with Larry, we managed to get into an argument about Monsanto and the evil Terminator Seeds. He sees Monsanto as a good corporate citizen, feeding starving third-world countries. I don’t. We also found time to argue about activists and whether they are bandwagon-jumpers or researchers. We agreed to disagree on both those items.
I’m still not done with the Porta-Potty coverage. The other day I remembered this hilarious story that a female singer told at the Tulip Festival a few years ago, about losing her prescription sunglasses in a Porta-Potty hole, and making a roadie retrieve them for her. I thought maybe it was Lynn Miles, but I wasn’t sure. So last night I spotted Lynn Miles at the Jim Bryson concert. It was too loud for conversation, so I slipped her a note identifying myself as the unoffficial porta-potty blogger of bluesfest 07, and asking if she was the teller of that story. She said no, if that had happened to her she would have retrieved her own sunglasses, but she did have a pretty good Mariposa Porta-Potty story.
I also ran into Miss Vicky and her nine-month-old son Gordon, a real charmer with his magnetic blue eyes and toothy smile. I was charmed.
It rained pretty hard at Bluesfest last night. I didn’t realize just how hard, even though I was standing in it, until I saw the rain on the big screen at the DJ Champion and his G-Strings concert. It was coming down in sheets. Once you’re soaking wet you can’t get any wetter, so it doesn’t matter anymore.
I did witness some umbrella altercations though. Several of the people I talked to thought umbrellas should be banned from Bluesfest, because they’re a nuisance and a hazard. Most of the complaints were about umbrellas blocking the view. But there were some eye-poking incidents on the way out. I wonder how many eyeballs the volunteers had to sweep up at the end of the night.
Speaking of volunteers, the vast majority of them are terrific again this year. However I did encounter a couple of security volunteers who seemed a bit high on the power of the uniform, even though the uniform is just a blue t-shirt that says security on it.
I was heading into the River Stage area one night, and the security volunteer gruffly ordered me to open my knapsack. Most of them just feel my knapsack from the outside, to see if there are bottles in there, but this one wanted me to open it. It was on my back, so I suggested it would be easier for him to just open it himself.
“No ma’am,” he replied curtly, “It’s a security issue. If I were to poke myself with something in there, it wouldn’t be good.”
So I took my knapsack off, and unzipped it for him. He then plunged both arms up to the elbow into its contents and rifled around in it. If I had had a needle in there, I don’t know how my unzipping the bag would have protected him, but whatever.
On my way home last night I overshot my bus stop on the transitway, and had to wait for another bus in the opposite direction. I met four lovely teenage girls there on their way to the Kanye concert. One of them was looking for a suitable bush to pee in, so I offered her a P-Mate.
“What’s a P-Mate?” they asked.
“It’s like a cardboard penis,” I said, “So you can pee standing up.”
Their eyes widened. I pulled one out and showed it to them. They were enchanted.
And that was Day 11 for me. Today’s the final day, and then we return to our regularly scheduled blogging.
It was great to see you1 The rain get the better of us, eventually, so we hightailed it after Jim Bryson.
I like the P-Mate coverage! Perhaps our friend at A1Great does not understand the allure of the P-Mate.
Heh. I’m over-equipped for the item in question. Its allure is lost on me.