Racine-area festivals, 2008
Note: This post recaps Racine-area festivals in 2008. For a more current list of festivals with links, see my Calendar of Events & Festivals.
In the month since I last posted here, nothing truly remarkable has transpired. We have tried to water our browning vegetation when possible. We had our chimney replaced. We have suffered several million mosquito bites.
On weekends, we have sampled a number of area festivals and annual events. Most of these were fairly enjoyable, but we did end up attending one too many, and were ultimately forced to plot a hasty escape and scramble home to the refuge of our backyard, still shuddering from the crude food, the mustaches, and the song that would not end.
More about those momentarily.
The weekend after Summerfest, we took in some of The Great Midwest Dragon Boat Festival. Previously voted the Number One Event in Racine County, it features races of long, Chinese-style dragon boats, each paddled by a crew of 20 teammates. Meanwhile, there’s a festival area featuring a nice assortment of your basic food vendors, plus an entertainment stage, and those inflatable jumping rooms for the little ones. It was a nice afternoon and we watched several races with our great niece and strangers from Chicago who have fallen in love with Racine. The only difficulty is that the race viewing area (green on this map) and the festival area (in orange) are a good half mile apart, which does not allow for easy switching between the two modes. Apparently, there is a free shuttle.
We also stopped by the festival at St. Lucy’s Catholic Church in Racine. It’s a smaller event than the big Greek Festival at Kismissis Greek Orthodox Church where we ate octopus in June. One of the most popular attractions at St. Lucy’s is the meat raffle — packages of steaks or chops or chicken breasts or fish fillets won during raucous drawings that seem to be going on continuously in one of the tents. From what I was told, this had originally been a booze lottery until someone cracked down, but the current competition for ribeyes and tenderloins still seems plenty spirited.
St. Lucy’s also featured a performance by The Britins, a Beatles tribute band that isn’t half bad.
The fourth week of July saw us at the final four days of the 17-stage International Cycling Classic (a.k.a. Superweek). We had been attending the Kenosha event for about a dozen years, and several of the other stages more recently, but 2008 brought a race to Racine for the first time. Advance promotion seemed nearly non-existent here, and attendance at our Thursday event was sparse, but the people who did come by seemed to enjoy the main race. With a little creativity on the part of the downtown merchants, plus some food and entertainment, our fair city could build The Racine.org Cycling Classic into something special.
The Friday night race in Kenosha — Chase Food Folks & Spokes — felt slightly faded from previous years. The crowd seemed thinner and did more vacant staring and less cheering than I had remembered, and there were fewer food vendors. Kenosha has a long cycling history, but this festival could stand some rejuvenation.
That Saturday, for the first time, The Great Downer Avenue Bike Race became an all-day party near Milwaukee’s lakeshore, south of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus. Previously a single race in the evening, there is now a full slate of races on Downer. The restaurants offer food on the sidewalks, and alcohol is permitted inside the course. Parties and cookouts fill the lawns of the big, beautiful homes along the back stretches. Ladies wear summer dresses, gentlemen wear their best shorts and flip flops, and people picnic on salads and sandwiches from Sendik’s or Whole Foods. It’s just a gigantic block party with bike races.
One resident let his barbecue get a little out of control, and a race was halted while a fire truck entered the course to reach his house. These things happen.
The cycling was outstanding. The final race featured a $7,000 Super Prime (one-lap premium) raised through the Ben’s Cycle cookout, and a finish that gave announcer Eddy Van Guyse goosebumps he’ll remember for the rest of his life.
Prior to the Downer races, in search of a lunch that would satisfy Amy’s “healthy food” requirements, we ate at Chin’s Asia Fresh on Oakland and Locust. It was exactly what were were looking for, but the whole time, Amy was staring curiously across the street at Oakland Gyros, billed as Milwaukee’s best.
The following day, we paid our first-ever visit to the Racine County Fair, and found it more fascinating than we had expected. The horses, cattle, hogs, sheep, and goats on display were all well-groomed specimens, and the sorts of animals we don’t see so often. You have to admire all the 4H and FFA kids who help raise them. It’s also reassuring to see that people still quilt, still bake pies, and still raise astounding onions. Perhaps the Wii versions of these activities are yet to come.
The fair’s midway area was a technicolor daydream. The dry weather had turned the grass a brilliant pastel green, and the signage for the rides and food vendors glittered and pulsed with every imaginable color. We drank some great fresh-squeezed lemonade, and I was served a corn dog by a drop-dead gorgeous young woman with a Russian accent. To top it off, we also got to see this creature:
On the way up to Whitefish Bay for the final day of Superweek, we detoured back to Oakland and Locust to try the Oakland Gyros. They were outstanding. The bathrooms, however, need tending.
The Time Warner Cable Whitefish Bay Classic is a more sedate venue than the Downer party, but still a relaxing and enjoyable end to a week in a beautiful little community with a lot of families lining the course and cheering as 17 days of racing come to a close on Silver Spring Drive. The award presentations when it’s over are bittersweet, and champagne, T-shirts and water bottles all spew into the crowd from the stage. Eddy Van Guyse is going fishing and we are going home because we have to work in the morning. We’ll see him next year.
There is, however, still a month of summer before Labor Day, with the promise of countless additional festivals right into autumn. Can you ever have too much of a good thing?
You can.
Recently, we sought out and attended an event which I’ll only name here generically as “Ethnic Fest.” It was held on church property at a crossroads in the Midwest. There is no website for it, and as far as I can tell it was not listed on any online events calendar. Amy knew about it and really wanted to go, so off we went. The turnout seemed light when we rolled up at about 2:30 or 3. There was a tent with musicians playing — or at least loud feedback squealing — and another tent with maybe 20 people eating.
Being unfamiliar with Ethnic food, we surveyed the offerings and asked a few questions, deciding finally to forgo the black, dry-looking sausages in favor of one lamb dinner and one pork dinner that we would share with each other. Initially, there was some confusion about whether the lamb was sold out, which seemed odd only three hours into a festival. As it turned out, there still was lamb to be had.
For a total of $19, we were each given a plastic picnic plate with a small serving of plain chopped onions in one small section. The other small section was used to hold shredded slaw vegetables. There was no dressing at all, just the dry, shredded cabbage and carrot.
The meats in the main section of the plate consisted of pieces of lamb and pork bone bearing fat and some actual meat, plus a few bonus samples of pork skin. The woman who served us was agitated because we would not declare a preference for ribs or chops. There didn’t appear to be much difference, and she finally gave us a little of “each.” This was served over a bed of some sort of tan, greasy rice that wanted to be risotto or at least Rice-A-Roni®, but was not. We each also got a hunk of dry bread that was useless without any sauce or olive oil or butter.
We chose the tent with the music, in order to enjoy it while we ate, and joined one middle-aged woman at an oblong table after asking her permission. There was a little small talk about Ethnic food and a lot of awkwardness as she closely watched us grappling with the fatty bones. She said she had already eaten.
The bone chunks were impossible to address with the small plastic knife that was provided, and too oddly shaped to permit biting the little bits of meat out of the pockets in the bones. The difficulty was enhanced by the fact that someone was staring across the table. She pointed out that the most festivals do not feature authentic, homemade food.
The music consisted of one sickly-looking man in a chair playing a button accordion and another man, standing behind him, playing an electric guitar that was electronically processed to produce balalaika-like sounds. Disassociated from their own music, they glanced blankly around, perhaps recalling phone numbers of long ago. Meanwhile, the notes produced by their fingers came in rapid succession, rising and falling with no apparent melody or pattern, but at breakneck speed. The sound was like a random, maddening, out-of-control calliope — a monstrous, drunken butterfly careening in any direction. Now we understood why most people ate in the other tent. It was too loud to talk here. We just smiled wanly as our table-mate scrutinized the plates we were now preparing to dispose of.
Several times during this music, a reasonably handsome, graying, playboy-type man wandered over to the band to offer a joke in the Ethnic language. He wore an off-white striped shirt and off-white painter’s pants with European loafers and no socks. He had a large, glittering watch, and gold chains. At the end of a lengthy song, he picked up a wireless microphone and wandered all alone to the middle of the large concrete parking lot the festival fringed. He gathered himself out there, obviously preparing to do something stupendous.
The musicians started up again, and the man began to sing. It was not particularly good singing, and not especially bad. It’s lind of hard to tell whether a singer is off-key when there is no discernible melody. He just droned on and on in the Ethnic language, embellishing the lyrics with a little wail here and there, but mostly just plodding through each verse to arrive at some punchline that we did not appreciate. Nobody else seemed to, either, despite the many apparent Ethics in attendance. Some of the men sported broad, Borat-style mustaches, and most of the women wore subtler ones. Nobody reacted to the singing at all.
The vocalist wandered over to the beer stand. He sauntered back to the musicians’ tent. He strolled out to the center of the pavement again. Sometimes, after singing a verse, he would hold the microphone behind his back and bounce gently on his toes. Now and then he would use a little fist jab to drive a line home. Nobody paid these punctuations any mind.
After about fifteen minutes of this song, I began to feel apprehensive that it was running long. Although there was no melody, there was a definite, rigid pattern to the verses, and I felt sure that some of them were being repeated word-for-word. He would sing a verse, assume a triumphant stance, and then plow ahead with another identical verse. Was this possibly the Ethnic version of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”?
As the song neared its thirty-fifth minute, I began making desperate facial expressions to Amy, who shouted in my ear that we could get our lounge chairs from the car and sit off to one side. She was obviously still enjoying the idea of celebrating the authentic Ethnic culture for the rest of the day and possibly into the night. I, meanwhile, was trying to determine which one of the mustached guys was most likely to be carrying a weapon that I could use to blow my brains out. Please, song — end.
About forty-five minutes in, the singer began to weaken. He had gulped a couple of beers between verses to moisten his strained throat, and now he was beginning to stagger like a boxer in the twenty-seventh round. There was no more toe-bouncing. He clearly intended to fight this song to the death.
I started to panic. I thought of loved ones I would never see again. I recalled the wrongs I have committed and the people I have hurt. I tried to imagine how Ernest Hemingway would have handled this.
Then, after sixty-seven epic verses, the song ended as insignificantly as it had begun. There was no climax, no thunderous finale, just the end of yet another verse followed by heavenly, blissful silence. No applause, no repeated thank-yous, no Bic lighters, no nothing. If the singer did swoon a little, no one noticed.
I turned to the woman at our table and jokingly asked her to translate it all into English. She earnestly replied that this would not be easy to do exactly, but that in general the song was about a very beautiful girl who worked at the mill and every man in town was in love with her.
It occurred to me that Loretta Lynn had crystallized this same idea in just three minutes and fifty seconds, and that the girl in question was possibly now selling corn dogs.
I mumbled something about getting a beverage and gestured in the direction of the beer stand just as the music started up again and the singer launched into fresh lyrics. Our companion nodded, acknowledging either that we did need a drink or that we would never see each other again, I don’t know which. I guided Amy to the beer stand, then around the corner to the raffle and across to the games of chance, in clear view of our car. There, I blurted out my plan to run for it. She agreed, and we left that festival in our dust, wiping the lamb fat from our hands and faces with Wet Ones® from the glove box.
