In the San Francisco Fog, Part 1

The first time I went to San Francisco was 1979 with my friend Pat as she attended the annual meeting of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

While she attended meetings, I rented a car and drove to Merced, in the central valley, to see an actual historic site, my grandmother.

This one wasn’t standard fare in the grandparent department, at least to my way of thinking. As a child, she'd moved with her family to Oklahoma before it became a state. She’d lived in the Far East. She was a successful businesswoman and an avid Christian Scientist. She had a waterbed. She outlived three husbands--though at that point she was still on her second, a pigeon fancier. While I can't say that I actually loved her, she was at least as interesting as a convention of preservationists.

The other highlight of that trip was seeing Ella Fitzgerald perform at the Venetian Room in The Fairmont Hotel. The tickets were $17 each and you got a cocktail with that....and of course free matches--they were everywhere in 1979. I still have two books of matches from the Venetian Room. Even with the drink and the free matches, I thought I might have to declare personal bankruptcy since the tickets were so expensive. Ella’s a legend, it was a great night. The brush with bankruptcy was worth it.

In the between 1979 and today, I’ve been to San Francisco a few more times. For an insurance convention (oh my), for Pride Weekend (oh my times a thousand), and just as a tourist, too.

This trip came about for a sad occasion. My friend Zan, the younger daughter of my friends Tracy and Rick, lost her battle with Hodgkins Lymphoma and I was headed west for the memorial service. Zan and her cool husband Todd had just taken me to dinner in August in Oakland at the tail end of my last California adventure. (Things have changed since Gertrude Stein's day, there's plenty of there there now.) It never occurred to me that I would be going back so soon, let alone for such a reason.

I flew out as a steerage passenger on Southwest from Philadelphia with another old friend, Rebecca. I was especially grateful for her company, since mourning is not something you should do alone.

 

Bearing in mind the airline's instruction "Literature Only", we passed the time on our flights west by reading Armistead Maupin’s novel Tales of the City on her tablet. I’d read the book a long time ago and hoped it would make an amusing re-introduction to S.F.  Written in the post Summer of Love, pre-AIDS, macramé era, its message about the meaning of family seemed especially appropriate for the trip.

While we stayed in the East Bay near the site of the memorial service, Rebecca and I arranged our trip so that we had a day The City. As in San Francisco. As so the day after our arrival in California, R. and I drove to the BART stop nearest our hotel. We parked in a nearly deserted garage, figured out the self-service BART ticketing kiosks, and before too long we were headed into The City. BART is similar to the DC Metro without the heroically cool 1970s vintage stations; both systems vintage down-at-the-heels subway cars make the same screeches and squeals. 

When we got to San Francisco, we got off BART at the first stop, Embarcadero. Upon exiting the station we discovered that it was raining cats and dogs. There was a special kind of weather my mother called San Francisco Fog, something she experienced firsthand when she and my father lived in Berkeley right after World War II. As far as I could tell, the term included everything from a light mist to sheets of rain just this side of Superstorm Sandy. We were in a big San Francisco Fog. 

We were clueless tourists with no raingear. At my suggestion, we walked down Market Street to the Ferry Building. Since it’s now a hip and chic marketplace filled with food stands, I thought there might be some sort of vendor selling umbrellas next the picture perfect artisanal free-range non-GMO heritage and organic rutabagas. Hey, it could happen, right?

The place was a sea of foodies and it immediately dawned on me that fighting the crowd to find the random umbrella seller was not happening. So, I resorted to my standard plan B….Ask a cute guy. 

There was a wine shop dead ahead. There were no customers and voila, the cashier was cute if tragically millennial.

R:  Hi. I’m looking for an umbrella. 
          
Millennial Cashier: We don’t sell those here.

R: Yes, I understand that.

To myself I muttered, I may be a rube from Central Pennsylvania but I can tell a wine store from an umbrella store at 30, maybe even 31, paces.

R: Well, I thought you might know where I could get one.

MC: This is my first day.
 
At which point, his older and less cute coworker came up to the cash register.

R: Rephrasing the original question,  Hi, I’m looking for a place where I could buy an umbrella.
 
OLCCW: We don’t sell those here.

Oy.

Time to find someone less cute.

We gave a once over to a gift-y booth—no umbrellas!—before stopping to ask a helpful looking woman at the chocolatier next door.

R:  Hi. I’m looking for an umbrella.
 
WC:  We don’t sell those here.
   
R:  Yes, I know that.

Apparently I look stupid enough to try to buy an umbrella at both a wine store and a chocolate shop.

Around this point, Rebecca reminded me she’d seen a Walgreen’s near the BART station. It was time to opt for an umbrella made in a Chinese prison instead of something picture perfect artisanal free-range non-GMO heritage and organic from the Ferry Building.

We hustled through the San Francisco Fog to Walgreens. We bought two collapsible umbrellas and two maize-colored ponchos, perfect for the Michigan fan on your Christmas list. The bill was $44.00. They might not have been picture perfect artisanal free-range non-GMO heritage and organic but they were certainly priced as if they were. We put on our ponchos and walked outside as we called/hailed/summoned (what is the proper term?) an Uber to take us to Fort Mason and our first destination, the Renegade Craft Fair.

In two shakes, our Uber driver called us as we crossed the street in our new raingear. It turned out that she was parked just two doors from Walgreens.

As we got in the back of her nondescript Hyundai she barked “You need to take those ponchos off. I don’t want you to get the seat all wet.”  

We dutifully took them off.  We’d worn them all of about 100 feet.

I passed on the opportunity to comment to Rebecca that even in the age of Grindr, getting screwed in San Francisco usually involves more foreplay than that, but I sure was thinking it.

On the other hand, cranky Uber woman did drive past the outer layers of Fort Mason to deliver us right to the building where the Renegade Craft Fair was taking place. Perhaps she’s just not a 10:45 a.m. person.

After our visits to the comfort station, where I witnessed a hipster adjusting his manbun in his native habitat, we were ready to see what was happening and now with 300 “makers”.

We entered the drawing for a chance to get annoying promotional emails for the rest of our lives.

According to the RCF’s press release, we were to be treated to stunning views of the Bay. We missed most of that.

And unless he was playing at frequencies that only dogs could hear, we also missed the “live sets by DJREDLite”.

Before we even made it to the makers, we stopped at a sponsor booth to sample Health-Ade Kombucha. It’s a probiotic (whatever that is) that promises to build strong bodies twelve ways. No wait. That’s Wonder Bread. Kombucha promises to make you fun faster and jump higher. No wait that’s PF Flyers sneakers.  How about it will keep you in skinny jeans, willing to spend $7 on a chocolate bar, your pork pie hat perched at a jaunty yet ironic angle, AND will make you receptive to the idea of anything picture perfect artisanal free-range non-GMO heritage and organic? What’s not to like, right?

Well, whatever the promises, Health-Ade Kombucha tastes just a bit like something you left in the refrigerator a bit too long, only effervescent. And depending on what you left in the refrigerator that’s a tad off, Kombucha can taste pretty good or just south of meh. 

I asked the super cute and effervescent—like Health-Ade Kombucha—sampling guy if drinking Kombucha would give me three floating bowel movements a day. He was taken aback: clearly he does not wait on a Bryant every day of the week.  But seriously, how can you pass out sample of a probiotic (whatever that is) and not expect people to ask about, well…Number 2?

I explained that I’d learned in a sponsor booth at my county fair that the key to good health was to have three floating bowel movements a day.  Three. Floating. Bowel movements. Truly. Unimpressed with my lower GI tract worldliness, the Health-Ade Kombucha guy wouldn’t make me any promises about the frequency or buoyancy of my effluvia. However, since I identified myself as a blogger I got a coupon for a free bottle (The coupon expires 12/31, call before midnight tonight!) and a photo too. Then again, perhaps he just thought I was a creeper and wanted to get rid of me.

So there were indeed 300 “makers” at the fair. And a few of them had cool stuff. But mostly it was rose to the level of underwhelming.

The Japanese crazy paper tube animals were cool, but hardly DIY. I am sure they were made in the giant factory of Amalgamated Japanese Crazy Paper Tube Animals, LLC. No makers were involved in the product.

We learned all about a startup called Maven which was a car sharing service like Zipcar but is even better since you don’t have to purchase gas and the cars are picture perfect artisanal free-range non-GMO heritage and organic. (Just kidding!) Even though neither R nor I lived anywhere near where Maven was available—it seemed as if it covered only a few neighborhoods in San Francisco--we listened politely to the booth babe (a term I mean in a non-sexist gender-neutral yet still objectifying way) since he was cute and had a cool black Maven logo tee shirt. And since we were there early in the day, we figured he needed to practice his spiel.

We did all 300 booths and that gave me more than my fill of the maker/DIY scene.
 

"Dad, is that you?"

We met an artist with great greeting cards but as far as stuff that I would buy with my own money, that was about it.

So that “emerging female-owned-and-operated creative studio producing a wide spectrum of useable objects including home goods, lighting, and wearables”….? Um, me not so much.  And the “artful notebooks and paper goods for the curious, creative, and bold”?  I gave at the office thanks. As for the “high quality, organic, chemical-free” skin care products? I prefer a daily chemical peel with low end crap I buy at Sam’s Club.

My take aways were:

Most of the stuff wouldn’t have made it past the jurors for the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts.  The stuff was nice enough, but the jewelry, especially, bordered on the rudimentary. It seemed as if it were OK to stop thinking once you had your first idea.

The audience was young and overwhelmingly straight. For yet another episode in my life, I was an outlier.

A minimalist booth is de rigeur, especially if it comes from the minimalist maker/DIY craft show booth section of IKEA. In a pinch, makers make do with chicken wire as an intentionally ironic substitute.

Square business cards, from MOO, are where it’s at. Rebecca filled me in on this. Makers are onto something here. They are cool.

Wherever possible, signs should use the Roz Chast hand lettering font.

Cacti and succulents are back. We saw 7 booths of cacti and succulents. This means that spider plants are the NEXT BIG THING.

People not only buy macramé, they wear it. Seriously. Macramé jewelry is a thing. I don’t know that Martha Stewart would call it a good thing, but it’s definitely a thing.

Not everything was made by hand—but if you are young and cute enough and wear monochromatic and somewhat asymmetrical clothes that look as if you bought them at an art festival—you can count as a “maker” too. 

With our fill of maker-ness, we called/summoned/hailed another Uber and waited in the San Francisco Fog for our ride to materialize.  I passed on a $4 cup of food truck Joe and the rest of the “exciting lineup of local food and drink options” while I was waiting. As any hipster can tell you, it’s hard to fit into skinny jeans if you eat actual food.


End of Part One

The New South: Tom Tom Founders Festival

After a detour at the Route 11 Potato Chip plant, it was time to head south to Charlottesville, where the Old South meets Berkeley, California. As such, it’s the perfect spot for a festival about innovation and named for, not just a signer, but the author of the Declaration of Independence.

I didn’t think seriously about going to the Tom Tom Founders Festival until someone in Penn State’s upper management intimated to me that the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts was lacking in a hip vibe.

Though at first I was a tad indignant—the words “hip vibe” do not appear in our mission statement anywhere. I learned, after griping incessantly to my friends, to close the gate on that. Sort of. And then I decided that checking out the Tom Tom Founders Festival was as good an excuse as any to go to Charlottesville. And if I played my cards right, I might even manage to get someone else to pay for some of the trip, since I would be doing research in how to acquire a “hip vibe”.

Alas, no OPM (other people’s money) was expended in my trip, but I managed to console myself with a bag of Route 11 Potato Chips and the thought of drinking bourbon in its natural habitat, i.e. below the Mason-Dixon Line.

According its program, the Fifth Annual Tom Tom Founders Festival takes place over Mr. Jefferson’s birthday week with “nonstop talks, workshops, panels, installations, and concerts”. Actually they do stop, but who am I to call someone out for a little hyperbole?

Tom Tom’s mission is to celebrate founding and inspire the next generation of artists and entrepreneurs. Like the founding polymath and namesake of the Festival, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Tom explores and melds diverse disciplines: scientific discovery, technology, the field to fork movement, education, and art that builds on the city’s rich history of founding and to chart a creative future. 

I wonder how many polymaths it took to write that?

Since my traveling companion Pam and I we were trying to embrace hipness on this trip, we looked for place to stay on Air BnB. What could be more hip than the gig economy? Actually, AirBnB wasn't our first choice: all of the outposts of corporate America with comfy beds, coffee makers, cable TV, free Wi-Fi, affinity points, and location location location were filled, even including UVa’s very own motel-for-executives, The Inn at Darden. Oh right…. there was a convention of polymaths in town.

In the end we didn’t do Air BnB, but rented an apartment through something called Stay Charlottesville. The apartment photos on its website included fewer bad tchotchkes and cats than those on AirBnB, and the places looked staged enough to appeal to my neat-nik sensibilities. And most importantly, we could be in a good neighborhood, not the sort of thing that the folks on Air BnB call “transitional” or “up and coming”. The apartment lived up to its billing, it was great!

The hot neighbor with the IMA NERD vanity plate was an added bonus not listed on the Stay Charlottesville website. He insisted that he had plenty of “nerd cred” though you wouldn’t know it by me, since in the few minutes of chatting he failed to mention high school band, particle physics, bagpipe lessons, or his Siamese cat named Steve Jobs.

We arrived in the late afternoon on Thursday, and after a dinner of “Asian tapas” at a place called Bang--which featured a drink reminiscent of my father's famous "Drop Your Panties Punch",  Pam and I went to the Paramount Theatre to hear that night’s speakers.

I went to see Craig Dubitsky. He’s the guy behind Hello Toothpaste (never heard of it), Eos Lip Gloss (never heard of that, either) and partly behind Method soaps and cleaning products (Bingo!) Somehow he met the guys who invented that stuff when they were less than nobodies and...actually, I’m not really sure what he did for them. The guy was totally entertaining --for two solid hours!--and at the end we got samples of toothpaste, that, although it has cute packaging, it is otherwise a solid “meh”.  Then again Crest and Colgate are a solid "meh" too. It's hard for me to get excited about toothpaste.

He put his phone number on the screen and his email and asked us to call him. Like many men, I never called.

Pam went to hear a talk on sports, and it sounded pretty neat but she didn’t get any toothpaste.

The next day, the Paramount Theatre was packed as the festival presented its "Founders Summit". There was a high concentration of blue blazers and man buns though not typically on the same person. I suppose Mr. Jefferson could have had a man bun if he’d wanted one.  What am I thinking?! He probably invented the man bun!

I had a feeling that all these folks would be on their way to Silicon Valley or Goldman just as soon as they could pull themselves away from the most hip coffee shop ever and their current project of monetizing something, anything—their social media following, unorganized sock drawers, or that cupboard filled with non-recyclable takeout Chinese food containers.

It was a day of TED-like talks. All were great with the exception of one that was too jargon-y, even down to the use of the phrases “bro drama” and “entrepreneurial ecosystem” within eye rolling distance of each other. No hyperbole here; I wrote it down.

First was Bill Crutchfied who told the story of his rise from selling car stereos from his mother’s basement shortly after he finished at UVa 50 odd years ago to heading a firm with $250 million in annual sales today. Amazon's Jeff Bezos even comes to him for advice. He was very impressive and told his story with a refreshing lack of self-aggrandizement.
 

Then toothpaste guy was back, with the Reader’s Digest version of the story I’d heard the night before. He was paired with a woman in killer high heels and what looked like a neoprene dress. She’d been something big at Google before founding something else and no doubt has Larry and Sergey and Mark and Sheryl in her phone.

During the breaks there was semi-tasty starfruit juice (emphasis on the "semi") and there was a man bun dense sea of earnest young people to chat up.

If you wanted coffee it wasn’t Maxwell House, or even Starbucks, but some ethically gown non-GMO fair trade heirloom low acid brew with notes of dark chocolate, cinnamon, and linty Hall’s Mentho-lyptus found in the bottom of a computer bag. There were sponsor tables too, but it was too crowded to get to any of those, so my guess that there were handing out some pretty decent stuff or else there was some bro drama going on in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and everyone was trying to get a good look.

The hit of the afternoon was Jason Flom, the founder of Lava Records. He was hellaciously entertaining telling the story of his career that included discovering many huge acts that are household names to those younger and hipper than me. According  to the Tom Tom website, he dropped the F bomb 24 times in his talk. I didn't notice the F bombs, I just noticed what an enthralling storyteller he was.

Things calmed down a bit when we got to Becca McCharen--a fellow grad of the UVa Architecture School--who's making a splash in New York designing clothes that look like exoskeletons and have biometric features, whatever those are. She was joined onstage by Doug Stoup, who takes rich people to the North and South Poles but is scared when his wife drives him to the supermarket. Then came Rodney Mullen, who won the Skateboarding World Championship 35 times. I didn't even know that skateboarding had a World Championship.

There were kids—as in under thirty—with great ideas that had attracted investors who were helping make those great ideas into viable businesses.  One of them went to UVa and he seems to have maxed out his credit card in the men’s department at the Urban Gay Store, which, even today, makes a guy stand out in Charlottesville.

We stayed there until the end of the day and then we met a friend (and reader…yay!) from S.C. and her husband who’d moved to C-ville not too long ago. They had friends in tow and so we had a beer off the beaten path before heading down the beaten path to the festival for a drink and dinner.

In the evening TomTom shed its TED Talk-ish demeanor and became a hipster city event. Lee Park (as in Robert E. Lee, who keeps watch over the park from the vantage point of a large equestrian statue in the middle of the joint) was a happening scene. There was a stage, with a band, with 32 video monitors as a backdrop. There were several beer trucks, so waiting in line was no problem. That's my idea of Southern Hospitality.

And there were food trucks where you could get Asian dumplings, Australian meat pies, Mexican stuff, and German things, too. We listened to the music, had dinner, and some beers, and had lots of laughs. Pam danced with someone in a Gumby costume: I embraced the hipster vibe as colored lights washed over Robert E. Lee and his horse Traveler.  It was a delightful evening. Did I mention that there were cinnamon sugar donuts, still warm from the fryer?

Saturday we were up early and walked a mile or so across town to pick up baseball tickets for the afternoon’s game against UNC--we were not only embracing innovation, we were embracing Virginia baseball, too. Pam couldn’t believe that West Main Street, now hip and upscale, used to be the kind of place University students of my day were told not to venture.

Even I have a hard time believing it. It’s all so…. hip and upscale.

We had a tasty breakfast bagel at a C-ville institution, Bodo’s Bagels. One of our fellow diners was a rather disheveled looking young man, still in last night’s suit, dress shirt, and untied bow tie. His gf was in gym shorts, tee shirt, and hair hidden under a baseball cap. Pam and I agreed that it was nice that she was talking him out to breakfast during his Walk of Shame.

Since it was a beautiful day for a walk, we did a jiffy tour of the UVa grounds.  I checked out the new capitals on the Rotunda columns.

After picking up the tickets, we stopped at the City Market, which I’ve written about before. It seems to have grown since my last visit and was filled with organic, free-range, heritage, and non-GMO fill in the blank, plus chiropractors, DIYers, ROLFers, and a model UN worth of ethnic food.  Mongolian lunch? Philippine snacks? Something Ecuadorian? It’s readily available. I’m sure if I’d paid more attention, I would have found specialties of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

We had a great chat with Bo from Bo’s Bodacious Brownies. She had an amusing life story and a big personality. If her brownies were half as bodacious as the fudge sauce we sampled, then they are brobdingnagianly bodacious. I’m not sure why we didn’t buy any brownies since we both like them. Perhaps we were still stuff with another multiple B food, Bodo’s Bagels.

The woman selling scratch and dent orchids was there as were oodles of cute farmers from farms with cute names selling grass-fed hormone-free beef/pork/lamb/and so on. The cute guys with the sausage stand are now selling shirts that say “Bacon gives me a lardon”, which, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, I found quite amusing. The shirts are a better deal than the meat, which seemed to be priced according to J P Morgan’s dictum about the cost of a yacht— “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

We arrived at the end of the Festival’s Iron Chef competition, where local chefs had a limited time and budget to cook up some tasty fare with food bought at the market. After the too hip MC announced the winner, he invited the audience to come to the stage to taste the entries. The crowd of frothing-at-the-mouth foodies rushed the stage in something that made a Black Friday doorbuster crush at Walmart look like a Mennonite church bazaar. I didn’t stick around for the EMT calls, but I had visions of grievous bodily harm inflicted by compostable forks.

I had a brief chat w one exhibitor who thought I might be an FBI agent. Seriously.  And this was after I asked if I could photograph her booth. She didn’t look as if she used lot of expensive beauty products; or inexpensive ones for that matter. She was an herbalist, acupuncturist, health educator, and then some, with what I think was the Visible Man of the acupuncture world in her booth. She wanted you to know where she’d stick a needle to jump start your chi or wangdoodle, or both, if you had good insurance or ready cash, as the case may be.

But if you rented one of her four tiny houses, yurt, or apartment on her farm and enjoyed a full farm breakfast of non-GMO pastured pork or non-GMO pastured goose and duck eggs, you would probably understand, unlike me, that true free-range non-GMO grass-fed probiotic heirloom beauty comes from within.

After the city market, we ducked in to the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, something that might be seen as a strange choice since we were at a Festival that was all about innovation.  At the very least I wanted to have a brief, as they say in L.A. real estate circles, lookie loo.  The building is a handsome Beaux Arts thing with neo-Jeffersonian touches, and I wanted to see if the interior lived up to the exterior.

Though the society is right next to Lee Park it’s not part of the Tom Tom tomfoolery. Presumably the society’s managers didn’t want to disturb the hushed aura of the place with an invasion of hipsters looking for the john and complaining—once they found it—that it wasn’t stocked with locally sourced lightly exfoliating toilet paper and Dyson Air-Blade hand dryers.

Except for the gracious and welcoming staffer, we were the only people there.

I know you’re shocked.

Fortunately, the building’s interior is as handsome as the exterior and was quite well preserved, right down to the oil portrait of Charlottesville’s early 20th century big kahuna, Paul Goodloe McIntire, over the fireplace in the library.

The building was designed as the public library, but it’s been the historical society for some time—the library moved next door to newer, bigger, better quarters.  Some of the exhibits were about what you might expect—on Charlottesville’s namesake, Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, on Charlottesville in the Civil War, and a real barnburner on the County Clerks of Albemarle County.

I didn’t peruse the County Clerks exhibit (though I do love the movie Clerks), but I did learn more than I thought possible about the former Princess Sophie Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. It’s a good thing that Princesses of low-end German principalities didn’t have to take the SAT in the 18th Century since her name would never have fit in the blocks the College Board allotted to that purpose. That wouldn’t have mattered to George III since he didn’t even have time to evaluate which high school clique she was in (cheerleaders/brainiacs/hippies/goths/Jesus freaks) since he married her the day he met her, something they don’t even do on American reality shows. The King, who really knew how to turn a phrase, said she was “eminently distinguished by every amiable endowment”. They had fifteen children together, so I would say that she apparently found the king’s endowment amiable as well.

Another exhibit was on the now mostly forgotten writer, Julia Magruder. Magruder (1854-1907) was a Charlottesville native who authored sixteen books, some of which had illustrations by artists people actually remember including Howard Chandler Christy and Charles Dana Gibson.  The exhibit rather breathlessly informed us that "Magruder's life and writings offer a view of the complex world of the post-Civil War South from the vantage point of a New Woman of the New South."

I have to admit; I’d forgotten that in the post bellum period Random capitalization became More Common.

Magruder’s sixteen books included such soft porn worthy titles as Across the Chasm and The Magnificent Plebian.

Heaving bosoms aside, the exhibit left unanswered my obvious question. “Was she related to Jeb Stuart Magruder, the Watergate conspirator?

For my money (ok, the admission was free) the best exhibit, by was one on Kathleen Clifford, another Charlottesville local whose work has been lost in the mists of time. (I’m sounding a bit like Julia Magruder, no?)  At age 15 she met a theatrical producer at a dinner party, and even though she had trouble even recognizing a script—she threw the first one that arrived in the mail away, thinking it was a catalog—and memorizing lines, but in no time flat she was getting top billing in a revue called Top O’ the World.

After her success in that production, her career took off as a “male impersonator”, which, I suppose we would call a drag king. She wrote her own material (sadly, none of it was in the exhibit) and performed on stage in the “smartest” clothes: top hat, tails, and even a monocle.  (Note to self: perhaps I would do better on Grindr if my profile picture included a monocle?)

She was “America’s answer to Vesta Tilley”, a famous English male impersonator, and sometimes performed on stage with a female impersonator, Bothwell Brown. (Who?) Ms. Clifford moved on to silent films, performing as a woman, and even did one talkie.  The last text panel noted that we really don’t much about her, and essentially said don’t believe anything you read.

A drag performer with the "smartest" clothes and a monocle. Who says that local history is boring?

I asked the staffer—a charming woman of the age you’d expect to find in the historical society—about Kathleen Clifford and she said that it has been the intern’s project. We agreed that the exhibit was “quite something”, one of those expressions that means whatever you want it to mean.  After a little bit of small talk (she had a sweet Virginia accent) I learned that she used to go to church with my old neighbor from University Circle, the putative Grand Duchess Anastasia.

In the 1970s before DNA testing was possible, a number of thoughtful people thought this crazy woman had somehow escaped being murdered by Soviet secret police with the rest of her family in 1918 only to turn up in a canal in Berlin the 1920s. Anastasia ended up in Charlottesville, married to a kooky retired professor whom my friends and I called Mr. Anastasia. They lived in the Charlottesville version of “Grey Gardens”, with a light up plastic crèche (Santa included!) in the front yard instead of a cameo appearance by Jackie Kennedy as at the Hamptons Grey Gardens. They were Charlottesville's dyed-in-the-wool local color.

With our fill of hipsters and history (at least for the time being), that afternoon we went to a UVa baseball game. We did a bit of tailgating with acquaintances from State College whose son--no, not Connor Jones--plays for UVa. It was a welcome change from the hipster-dense atmosphere of the festival.

It was a beautiful day for baseball, but unfortunately the Tar Heels spanked the Wahoos, 8-1.

After the game, we had Festival food for dinner, and listened to some of the bands at the Festival and watched that night’s closing act, a documentary film on CLAW, the Collective of Lady Arm Wrestlers.

My words won’t do it justice, but if it’s on Netflix, or whatever, watch it. The gist of the story was this vaguely Jennifer Garner looking woman who sounded like my former pastor’s wife was mourning the death of her husband and started to arm wrestle as a way to work through her grief.

Happens all the time, right?

And taking a leaf out of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland’s book (“We can put a show on in the barn!”) soon enough she’d founded an entire arm wrestling league.

Women who wrestle in the league have comic personas and wear costumes, like in professional wrestling. Except these Lady Arm Wrestlers perform as characters with a definite feminist slant: Pain Fonda, Darth Mater, Laura Ingalls go-Wilder, Homewrecker, C-ville Knievel. They all seemed like they could live next door to you, but once they were in character, look out!  They really arm wrestle, too—the film shows two of the women breaking their arms wrestling—one break was so severe that the woman was hospitalized. The film covered the league expanding into several other cities as it gave women an outlet to perform and raise money for charity. It was hilarious.

It was hard to top the Lady Arm Wrestlers, but we gave it a go with a nightcap or two. There was a lot of the festival we missed, the craft cocktail competition, some public art projects, networking out the ying yang, but in the end, our minds were broadened as the Founding Polymath would have wanted. I’m not entirely sure that saw anything that would translate directly to our non-hip, north of the Mason-Dixon festival, but we agreed that we’d come back…just as soon as I finished growing my man bun.

The Christmas Tree Capital of the World

I don’t know about you, but one way I spell fun is to go to a conference in Indiana, PA, a town that bills itself as the Christmas Tree Capital of the World. While I saw the sign that made that very claim, I didn’t see a single Christmas tree farm. I saw lots of dairy farms, and some beef cattle here and there, but not a single Christmas tree farm. On the other hand, I didn’t see a holiday tree farm, or even a menorah farm, so there was no sign of a vast left-wing conspiracy to take the Christ out of Christrmas Tree Farm.

I’m not sure which came first, Indiana, Pennsylvania or the State of Indiana, but as a Central Pennsylvanian I often have a nanosecond of confusion when someone mentions Indiana and I have to figure out which one they’re talking about without looking like I’m trying to figure that out. Yes, I’m a doofus.

In addition to the business about Christmas Trees, Indiana is known for being the hometown of Jimmy Stewart. There’s even a small museum devoted to the star in downtown Indiana—across the street from the site of the hardware store that his family owned. The museum is a bit hokey, but charming, too, and is definitely a must-do if you’re in Indiana. While the Stewart family seems to support it, don’t go there look for his Best Actor Academy Award for Philadelphia Story—it’s someplace else.

But there are plenty of interesting items—for example, the script for Harvey and the front door from his now demolished house in Beverly Hills. There are also lots of things like the stuff that I have from my grandfather: kitschy knicknacks, his high school diploma, business papers, and awards from various service clubs.

His office has been recreated, and there’s also a booth from Chasen’s, the favorite L.A. eatery of the stars of the Jimmy Stewart era. Had this been the Bryant family museum, it would have been the booth from The Corner Room where my sister barfed when she was a kid.

My meeting was held at IUP, formally known as Indiana University of Pennsylvania. There is no relation in the slightest to the No Descriptor Needed University of Pennsylvania. My grandfather was a member of IUP’s Class of 1916. He grew up on a farm (dairy, not Christmas tree or even menorah) near Indiana and lost his leg in a farming accident when he was a small child. Since he used a wooden leg, I mean, prosthetic device, he was unsuitable for farm chores, he went to college to make something of himself.

IUP seemed to have a handsome campus even though more often than not I thought I felt as if I was entering any building I went to via the back door. Fisher Auditorium was particularly nice—it’s sort of a Georgian chapel (less the steeple) from the front while the interior is Art Deco movie house. I suppose that makes it an architectural mullet—all business up front and party in the rear.

The conference was the annual hoedown for presenting organizations in Pennsylvania. Although there are some nice people in the group, it can be pretty dreadful—you try sitting next to a pit bull-like agent pitching a tenor slash airline gate agent from Long Island at lunch. This year I had the good fortune of running into an agent for a band I’d booked last year. We’d only met on the phone and so it was a pleasant surprise when he introduced himself. He was bright and funny and didn't look at all like the person I imagined him to be, not that I had a clear picture in my head.

Our conference’s main luncheon was in what seemed to be the central administration building—though I’m not entirely sure what it was, since I went in the back door. The room was decorated with patriotic and neo-classical plaster reliefs. Presumably they were thought to be educational and uplifting to students of my grandfather's era. I think I was the only person in a room of 100 or so to take much interest in them.

The luncheon speaker was John Astin. Yes, Gomez Addams. He’s alive! I think he went to IUP with my grandfather. Actually, he wasn’t that old, just almost, and really, looks pretty good for someone I thought was dead. His luncheon speech was long and he didn’t mention The Addams Family or Patty Duke once. The highlight of the lunch was when someone’s phone went off and they couldn’t figure out how to stop it. Even John Astin stopped talking and asked what was going on as the embarrassed perp tried to beat the offending phone into submission.

Lots of the conference is devoted to showcases—brief (15 minute)— performances that are intended to entice presenters, like me, to book the performer. In a way it’s like an audition. There were some great showcases and then well, there were the not-so-good showcases.

One guy played little whistles and looped the tunes he created. Pretty soon it sounded the Nature Company Store at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in 1984. He clearly did not know the meaning of the technical term “15 minutes”. Had they not turned up the house lights, I think he’d still be there enjoying his own company. There were also some semi-leaden dancers, of the Ukrainian and modern variety. Not my thing. How could I forget the chamber music group that sounded as if they’d handed each player music for a different number? I’ll pass thanks. There was also a glitzy country-classical family group that sounded OK if you like that sort of PBS telethon act. My guess was that they practiced so much that they were left with no time to ask that important question, “Which is worse, my dress or my hair?” I’m sure they’ll be quite successful, but they weren’t really a fit for CPFA.

There were some unexpectedly good showcases, too. If you can blow a balloon up with a leaf blower, and then crawl inside the balloon, and act like the monster from Alien, I promise I’ll laugh. Some acts I’d booked in the last year or two were there showcasing. The fact that those acts were both talented and professional made me feel smart for having brought them to the Arts Festival.

After enduring leaden dancers long enough on the last night of the conference, my friend Patrick the agent and I decided to stop in at the hotel bar. It wasn’t very crowded at first—apparently my professional colleagues like bad dance more than I do. We were shooting the breeze and having a few chuckles with the guy a few empty stools away when the subject of mooning people came up. Patrick and I both admitted to having mooned people at least once in our lives. I asked Ashlee, the friendly bartender, if she’d ever mooned anyone.

“Oh yeah, lots of times”, she said casually, as if I’d asked her if she’d ever gotten a parking ticket. She proceeded to share the story of how she repeatedly mooned her grandmother in a nursing home, exposing not only her not insubstantial ass, but also her tattoo.

"What's your tattoo", I asked, expecting her to say, the Steelers logo, or perhaps Wilma Flintstone.

 “What’s that little angel with wings called?”

 “You mean a cherub?”

 "Yeah, that’s it!”

Ashlee told us that her grandmother loved it when Ashlee dropped trou and bent over right there in The Home. I have no doubt that it was some sort of religious experience. Bernadette of Lourdes sees the Virgin Mary; a woman in a Pennsylvania nursing home sees a cherub tattooed on her granddaughter’s ass. I suppose that comes under the heading of "God speaks to us in different ways."

A key part of Ashlee’s mooning ritual was the fact that the cherub was a little worse for wear since when Ashlee “went tanning” she neglected to put “that stuff” on him. I wasn’t exactly sure what “that stuff” was (asbestos? duct tape?) or what could have possibly happened to the little (OK, probably kinda big) guy, but I’m hoping that he’ll get some medical attention once Obamacare goes into effect.

On my way home from the conference, I tried to find the farm where my grandfather, Harry Nehrig, grew up, and where I had to endure a couple of Nehrig family reunions when I was a small child. I tried to look it up online, and found a web page that said that the farm had been in the same family for seven generations. While my grandfather the family patriarch loved going to the reunion, and having his children and grandchildren there, an afternoon on the farm eating congealed salads in the company of my rural relations was not for me.

I found Nehrig Road but that was it. There was a ranch house right there with a big rock in the front yard that said it was the Nehrigs.

My only photos of the Nehrig Reunion...c.1952, when I was not yet even a gleam in my parents' eyes.

I thought about stopping and introduce myself, and showing them my family tree and vintage reunion photos, and asking where the farm I barely remembered was--it had to be around there someplace. In the end, I decided that long-lost distant relatives would have to wait, that whatever lore they might share could never compete with the story of a woman who mooned her grandmother in a nursing home.