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Sunday, October 24, 2004 Pumpkin Festival The city of Keene, on the outside, looks like a lot of other American towns. Suburbania has crept in with its Rite-Aids and strip malls and ugly gas stations. It has even crept into the very historic heart with the Subways and Starbucks. But briefly, yesterday, the historic heart expelled any signs of modern corporate blandness for something a bit older, chaotic, and wild. The weather, in the balmy 40's, was perfected with a roiling overcast sky and dried-blood-colored leaves crunching with the consistency of freshly laundered reciepts and grocery lists forgotten in pant pockets under my sneakers. The rough layout of the festival is that of a crooked cross. I crept in through the bottom of the cross and immediately plunged into a flock of white tents with local merchants hawking maple, fudge, and honey. Shiny silver rings and crosses glued on dyed tumbled stones. Armpit purses and headbands. Belts, bells, balloons. Paintings and holiday trinkets glittering like filmy gold leaf. And the pumpkins! On the local radio, the announcer lady cheerily announced this year's goal of surpassing last year's 28,000+ pumpkins with 30,000. At the ends of the festival cross arms were plywood and metal towers rivaling the church steeple. These towers were filled with carved pumpkins. Happy faces, sad faces, scary faces, funny faces. Intricate carvings, grotesque carvings, carvings with the addition of spiky toothpicks. Simple carvings with nothing but a letter were actually part of a series of carved pumpkins spelling out the names of local businesses and their associated web addresses. (Ah! Pumpkins co-opted for commercialism!) More pumpkins lined the streets and overfilled an empty fountain in the center square. Pumpkins of all shapes, sizes, perfections, and colors. There was no such thing as too few pumpkins as more people streamed into the festival with carved pumpkins in boxes, arms, wheelbarrows, strollers, and stacked on the head. A station had been set up for pumpkin carving and a crowd was busy stabbing, slicing, sawing those hapless orange gourds. An orgy, a sacrifice of pumpkins! It's enough to send a plant activist into a dead faint. Food vendors also lined the streets and on my empty stomach (I had arrived a little past noon, without lunch) everything smelled smokey and tantilizing. I ordered a bowl of scalding clam chowder and I stood on a grassy corner, surrounded by tiny grinning pumpkins eating and observing the crush of people oozing past me. A number of people were dressed in costume--mostly predictable. Young girls as Snow White. Young boys as super heroes. A troupe as the characters in the Wizard of Oz. Teenagers as horror-slasher-flick villans and devils. Older men as Dracula. Plump young women as busty tavern wenches. And thin middle-aged women as vampy witches with skin-tight cotumes to match their demeanor. The only original costume I spied was an orange iMac. There was also entertainment in the form of performances like an audio play, a choir, Andean pipes. The local theater was showing free cartoons and the Three Stooges. A stage was set up for a succession of local bands. I only stuck around to observe two boy bands: one in which all the members were thin fashionable young men with longish dark hair and screaming guitars surrounded by teenaged female groupies and the second in which all the members were dressed as hicks in button-down shirts and baseball caps and had an audience comprising of beer-bellied and moustached thirty-somethings and their frizzy-haired wives. I did what any visitor would do. Take pictures of pumpkins. And satisfied with that, I headed back to the parking lot only to see a gaggle of my fellow graduate students just arriving, each of them glued to the side of their girlfriends/boyfriends. At that moment, reality intruded--I was no longer part of a crowd having a grand time but someone so awkward and strange (the third wheel, the odd aunt, the black sheep) that it wasn't even funny. I wondered briefly if they pitied me for going alone. I hope not. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 10:00 AM : ]
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