Back in 1978 a member of the Tourist Development Association wanted to add a spark to the dry tinder of the town’s autumn economy with a festivity before the tourist season began in earnest. Thirty years later, Fantasy Fest has the wallop of Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the sizzle of Carnivale in Rio de Janiero. Ever heard of a bonfire?
While the rest of the town remains in business as usual mode, Duval Street becomes ground zero for ten days of intense partying. From the Goombay street fair and Coronation of 2009 Fantasy Fest King and Queen on Friday October 23 to the “Fat Lady Sings” Tea Party on November 1, every day is filled with entertainment.
Ordinary diversions like the wet T shirt, Home Made Bikini contests, and Toga Parties and originals like The Third Annual “Pinking of You” Decorated Bra Auction, Captain Tony’s Party in Plaid, the 27th Annual Headdress Ball (this year’s theme was Hedonistic Heroes and Vexing Villains with Prizes for Best Headdress), Dress In White Night, and The 9th Annual Living Art Airbrush Expo (using the human form as a living canvas for artistic expression). Then there’s the Dungeon of Dark Secrets and Fetishes, hmmmm. Straight, gay, or somewhere in between, there is something for everyone. And everyone is having a good time.
pt at large returned to Key West the day before the Friday October 30 Masquerade March, a clothing optional promenade of Disneyland proportion. Good idea.
The tropical sun ricochets off bleached tombstones as over a thousand paraders and spectators home in on the front gate of Key West Cemetery. Where else would anyone begin a Halloween March? It is 5 P.M.
Marchers with a drink in one hand and camera in the other yak it up and admire each other’s attire. Gallons of body paint, pounds of sequins, yards of taffeta, not to mention latex, leather, and lycra, have been deployed creatively.
Key West has issued a giant permission slip to participants to dress up (or down) as vampires, vixens, villains, pole dancers, kinky kings, naughty nurses, tooth fairies, monks, gladiators, sailors. Wizard of Oz characters - the list goes on.
Fantasy Fest spins straw into gold when an amalgam of levity and nudity commingles as accountants, teachers, librarians, lawyers, idlers, retirees, engineers. layabouts, - whoever- shrug off the fetters of convention and load up on body paint, Halloween costumes and an insouciance that’s contagious.
One woman walking topless down Main Street USA would end up on the evening news. Hundreds of undraped men and women walking over a mile from the cemetery to Duval Street during Fantasy Fest cause nary a ripple in Key West.
Before long, I’m looking people up and down and saying, “You look fabulous!” and snapping photos. This is a parallel universe. These people haven’t become unhinged, just liberated for a few hours from the norms for the rest of the known world.
Look around. See men and women who’ve been getting mail from the AARP for a decade or more. They look their age and egads are they whooping it up.
Someone in the crowd remarks that some participants would be better off with their clothes on. NO, I say, This is democracy in the buff. What makes this festival fabulous is that people with soft, flabby, too big, too small bodies are flipping the bird to the conglomerates that fill glossy magazines with images of airbrushed perfection. And aren’t ashamed to bare it all right next to the hard bodies.
Free punch and beer are served along the route on tables outside neighborhood guest houses and inns en route. Mardi Gras beads, flung by celebrants on balconies and porches, rain down and end up in tree branches, phone lines and in the hands of the happy.
No one appears intoxicated. I haven’t heard one catcall or crude remark. The drag queens are sassy. Everyone is jovial. When a knot of people forms up the street, you know a spectacularly painted body or cleverly designed costume in the middle of it.
“Nothing is free in Key West. Don’t rely on inaccurate self-exams. Have one here from an experienced hand!” shouts a man wearing a box with two chest-high holes carved in it.
He’s drawn a crowd and a several women accept the offer, much to the delight of the crowd.
By 7 PM, thousands of people have descended upon Duval Street, where several blocks have been cordoned off. Music pours from bars and saloons, Merriment prevails.
Masquerade March is a good-natured bawdy spectacle so far outside the pale of ordinary celebrations it defies explication. I’ve never seen such light hearted displays of flesh and costumery, refreshingly void of self-consciousness and filled with laughter and joie de naughtiness. I know where I’ll be trick or treating next October.
Life Friendly Gardens: Feed Them Love, Not Chemicals
Summer is still splashing around in Watertown. Several of the gardens listed in the Life Friendly Garden Tour last weekend happened to be within walking distance of my digs on Oliver Street. It's inspiring to see how many ways there are to create a garden, large or small, with familiar or unique plants, sculptures, outdoor furniture, or even objects cast away by others, that results in an aesthetically pleasing, even whimsical, space.
The mini landscapes surrounding several of the 14 houses on the tour within walking distance of my house were impressive. I’m good at growing grass, a few hardy shrubs, and two beds of pachysandra, which, as you know, require the maintenance skills of a sodbuster.
Knowing and accepting my limitations around anything requiring green thumbery is an asset. No longer do I view creative landscaping and plants that appear to be ready for a photo shoot for HG TV with malaise and a sense of insufficient imagination, an utter lack of what George H.W. Bush labeled “the vision thing.”
A walk through these gardens has the same effect on me as it does on their creators. Sort of an earth bound “Tranquility Base.” One gardener calls her space an "urban patch of solace" after a long day’s work. Another calls hers a “healing garden, healing first of all for me, the gardener, who finds infinite renewal in its ever changing beauty through the seasons.”
Entrance to Sharon Bauer's "Healing Garden" at 62 Pearl Street, Watertown (click Life Friendly Gardens Tour above).
Gardeners, like artists of any stripe, enjoy showing their work to fellow gardeners or oooh and ahhhhh types like myself. Cutting in flowerbeds, adding rocks, stones, and outdoor sculpture, tiny hand constructed pools complete with goldfish, and finding the right plants that will flourish in your environment requires patience. Some of the gardens on the tour have been in process for years.
These folks share tips and information. There are no proprietary secrets in this group. They’re eager to give ideas to the neophytes and share cuttings or little starter pots with anyone who asks.
They’ve got Farmer’s Almanac mentalities and plant flowers that will bloom from spring to late fall. Never a dull month in their gardens.
The result is a shade garden (left) chock full of several kinds of hosta and shade loving flowers plus funky, colorful little garden sculptures plonked around the shady stuff - “an urban perennial shade garden,” she says.
The son of one homeowner made a small rock lined pool and filled it with koi (goldfish) and comets and topped it with lilies that Monet would have loved.
The same gardener, Sharon Bauer, printed a pamphlet for visitors. “Wild flowers flourish around the edges, providing food for humans and animals. Milkweed attracts Monarch butterflies. Goldfinches flock to evening primrose seeds, mockingbirds to pokeweed berries. The pin cherry tree next to our driveway volunteered from a seed dropped by a bird, and now catbirds enjoy a feeding frenzy when the cherries are ripe. Bees love goldenrod. Plantain heals bee stings. Motherwort, yarrow, red clover, nettle, chickweed, lady’s thumb and many other 'weeds' provide good medicine.”
Henry David Thoreau, legendary naturalist who lived in nearby Concord, MA, would have been right at home in this intersection of random acts of nature and conscious acts of gardener. Maybe this is what he was thinking about when he said,"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."
Vines bearing Mucat grapes cover back porch
The Chemical Use Reduction and Education Task Force (CURE) that sponsored the tour is a project of the Watertown Citizens For Environmental Safety (WCES), which is committed to educating the public about the dangers and safe alternative solutions to chemical use in the house and garden.
Today was a tour de force that showed beauteous gardens can be created without the aid of pesticides. Imagination, patience, and a good work ethic will do it just fine.
Photos by Paul Tamburello
September 13, 2009 in Commentaries | Permalink | Comments (7)
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