Читать книгу The Columns (Volume One) - Tracy Lorenz - Страница 7

By Tracy K. Lorenz

Walking around and taking notes before the Coast Guard festival…

Teenage girls never look happy, this unhappiness is tripled at a carnival. I was walking around the Coast Guard Festival carnival and this was the typical scene: Four girls would be doing the buffalo stance, slack jawed, one girl would have a phone pressed to her head but wouldn’t be talking. A tear would appear, the phone would hang up, and the girls would walk very fast to a different location, “phone girl” in front, following girls in descending order of hotness.

I swear that every single person in Grand Haven wears flip-flops, I don’t even know why we have shoe stores, it’s like I’m living in Hanoi.

One of the added benefits of living near downtown GH is some of the bands and dance troops practice day and night at the church parking lot near my house. Two nights ago I got to hear “Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it’s off to work we go” blasted through speakers carried in the back of a pick-up truck. Last night it was some marching band playing ten seconds of a song followed by a whistle and then yelling followed by small bursts of drum-fire. It seems drummers just cannot not drum. This morning I woke up to the sound of bagpipes. No one, ever, should wake up to bagpipes.

To me, bagpipes are like lobsters; someone had to be the first to look at a lobster and think “Hmmm, I’d like to eat that.” Someone had to be the first to put a flute in a sheep’s bladder, hear the resulting screech and think “Hey, I might be onto something here…”

He was wrong.

Same goes for the banjo.

I’m still amazed by people who have the guts to come into town three days before the parade and stake off another persons yard. Then again I’m still amazed that people go to parades.

There’s also a craft show going on. It would appear that over weight women are more attracted to craft shows than skinny women. This doesn’t make for ease of movement through the aisles.

It’s also apparent that overweight women have no clue what’s going on in any direction except straight ahead.

“Wooden cut-out Garden statues” are to art what the president inviting a cop and a race baiter to have a beer at the white house is to diplomacy.

If you didn’t know better, “sun stroke” sounds like it would be a nice thing.

How long before the Discovery Channel puts out a show about Carnies? “Deadliest Dart!” “Man vs. the Rope Ladder”, “Cash Flab”. Maybe once a year they could have “Tooth Week”.

In the carnival food hierarchy, the snow cone is dead last.

But lemonade is the biggest gyp.