DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

When I lived in the City, I loved the street fairs — weekend-long art and food and music festivals centered in the best neighborhoods in San Francisco. Festival staff would barricade six or eight blocks of the neighborhood, set up stages and booths, and host hundreds of artists, craftspeople, local restaurants, and bands.

I have vivid memories of the Union Street Art Festival and the Fillmore Street Jazz Festival, both of which were walking distance from my apartment. I saw the old Charlie Hunter Trio at one fair. I saw John Handy at another. I saw a hand-carved maple rocking chair, on display at a custom furniture booth; it was the most comfortable and certainly the most exquisite rocking chair I’ve ever experienced. The only thing that kept me from bringing it home was the extra zero at the end of the price tag. (It would have cost me eight months’ rent.)

These fairs were the highlight of the summer. The food was exotic, the music was live, the people were absurd. And the open-container laws were nowhere to be seen: not only were people walking around with wine and beer, vendors sold both in commemorative glasses! Alcohol, glass, and asphalt don’t mix well, but there it is, summer in San Francisco in the ’90s… maybe only a tiny shard of the freedom and love they had there in 1969, but we took what we could get, even if the shard was stuck with beer residue to the bottom of my tennis shoe.

Anyway, today we were excited to visit the 51st Annual North Beach Festival.

The bands were rocking. The food booths ran for blocks. (So did the lines.) It felt like old times, except for the stroller I was pushing. I used to silently curse the parents pushing huge baby carriages through dense crowds, so I was sympathetic to the people whose calves I was ramming.

We made our way to a fenced-off area near one edge of the festival, because the fence suggested that more fun could be had on the other side. Large signage declared that nobody under 21 would be admitted — a message I stopped attending to when I was in college, around the time it became a lot less likely that I’d be arrested for seeking access to a tavern. I waved my ID at the burly guard, who motioned pointedly at my 6 month old son and said, “Nobody under 21.”

Oh, that’s very funny, I thought, he’s probably been waiting all day to make that joke. Having matured slightly since those minor-in-a-tavern days of my early college years, I refrained from insulting the guy out loud; instead I smiled indulgently, laughed aloud for the benefit of the other burly guy blocking the gate, and made to ram them both in the shins with the front wheel of the stroller.

They didn’t move.

I looked up from the spot just below the first guy’s knees, where the front fender of the stroller would have hit him, to see him shaking his head. “Nobody under 21,” he repeated.

“Don’t worry,” I said, thinking he was overplaying the gag but determined to get past him anyway, “he won’t be drinking. Unless your beer bottles come with nipples.”

“NO KIDS,” he announced in a tone that suggested that my lack of understanding demonstrated the depths of stupidity to which American society had descended. Meanwhile, I was pretty sure that the fact that it took two big tattooed guys to keep a six-month-old out of a street fair provided evidence of the same thing.

So we contented ourselves with the beer-free zone, which actually worked out better, because the other of the two things that could only be found inside that fence was sunburned drunk people. We didn’t need to go there.

The first booth I saw was another place I didn’t need to go to.

The second booth, while not actually offensive, proved that even something as transcendent, as culturally profound, as horizon-expanding and as cool as surfing can be rendered small, cheap, and embarrassing in the hands of, say, somebody who thinks it’s a good idea to play cellphone ring sounds or emergency-vehicle sirens in radio commercials. Witness Mauna Loa’s cheeseball portable amusement-park ride, which does to surfing what the mechanical bull did to rodeo. With apologies to the guy I happened to catch on camera, I can tell you from firsthand experience that it is impossible to look transcendent, profound, or cool while riding a mechanical surfboard at a street fair. You’ll look like a clumsy wannabe, and then you’ll either get pitched on your head, or you’ll ride it out for 60 seconds and win … a T-shirt hawking macadamia nuts.

I liked it, though. We get a different variety of looney here in the country. I’m thinking about going back for the Fillmore Street Festival in a couple weeks.