Arts Festival 2012, Part 1: iPhonography Edition

Getting ready to take his show downtown. Apologies in advance, Pittsburgh.

I think I have only missed the annual Three Rivers Arts Festival two or three times since I was sixteen, and I’m sure Henry had something to do with it. It’s tradition, even when I’ve been too broke to afford anything more than the trolley fare it costs to take me there. Before I got a job downtown, it was pretty much the only thing that ever brought me down here—in addition to the urge to randomly dance to Andy Gibb in the middle of Liberty Avenue on a Saturday night, which I still say was one of my finer moments—so that’s why I can usually only find my way around down here if someone gives me directions in relation to the Arts Festival layout. (But it is still best that I walk around with a seeing eye Law Firm co-worker.)

And now suddenly my kid is very much “OMG THE ARTS FESTIVAL! WHEN ARE WE GOING?!” This pleases me. (Also what pleases me is knowing that he can probably produce better art than a lot of what’s down there.)

In honor of the Arts Festival, there are these awesome mannequins all over downtown Pittsburgh. Chooch has seen some of them already from the car when he and Henry come and pick me up from work, and he has been dying to get his pose on. Unfortunately, so was pretty much every other asshole down there, and I literally had to edge my way in front of a group of yuppie and their flock of inconsiderate Benetton-swathed children who, I’m sorry, had totally outwore their photo-op welcome after the ninth completely un-funny pose. Give a working class kid a chance!

Corn(dog)rows, or what corn-breaded hot dog enthusiasts (a/k/a carnies) oft refer to as “breakfast.” I have a picture of Chooch eating his corn dog, but it looks so embarrassingly phallic that I just can’t do that to him. Now, if it were Henry…

Henry got me a falafel sandwich, and the goal was to convince Chooch to sit in the lawn with me long enough to orally pulverize the shit out of that pita pocket but instead he had to play that awesome game that all parents love where their children wander away and try to get abducted. So instead of having my falafel sandwich shit lettuce and tzatziki sauce in one isolated spot, I hansel-and-gretel’d it all over Point Park, my shoes and the depths of my cleavage.

Wishing this was his father. Me too, kinda. This looks like the kind of husband that would buy his wife a plane ticket to California to see Jonny Craig’s solo show at Chain Reaction, probably while copulating with his mistress in his wife’s absence, but what the fuck do I care, I’m going to see Jonny Craig, bitches.

I know, what a fantasy right? Like I’d ever actually have a husband.

Speaking of non-husbands, mine bought me this glorious Jesus print from my new favorite artist Lex Covato (and she’s not just my favorite because she liked my quotation mark tattoos). What a lovely addition to my religious art collection. That room in my invisible house is really coming along!

I do not know if these trees are real or not, and I see them all the time. I guess I could have read that sign.

Or, you know, touched one of them.

After we exhausted all there was to do in the heart of the Arts Festival, we walked down one of the streets that I don’t know the name of and ran smack into the middle of a jazz festival.

There was a large stage in the middle of the street attracting a fairly sizable crowd, and since we were kind of tired from walking around all day, we sat down a curb and pretended to be jazz fans. (Mostly, Henry just scanned the crowd for girls who maybe work at Blush.)

Chooch apparently is a jazz fan, though. At least he was for a few seconds until he started reading the zombie book Henry bought him.

(“Zombies Hate Stuff” – Greg Stones once again had a booth at the arts festival.)

Legit jazz fans.

There were some older broads in front of us who I thought at first were having epileptic seizures, but it turns out they were just REALLY into the music. At one point, I thought to myself, “Hey, I think I know this song. I guess this small potatoes, local Pittsburgh band that I cannot see from where I’ve popped a squat is doing a cover of some other, mildly-popular song that I guess I heard on Lite FM as a kid*.”

(*Or last week. Listening to soft rock is one of those things that makes me a case study in contradictions. Wendy acted all shocked yesterday when she learned that I love Barry Manilow.)

On a whim, I decided to look up the jazz festival line up on my phone.

“Huh,” I said to Henry. “Turns out this is Average White Band. And here I thought they were some cover band.”

“Yeah, covering their own songs,” he said smugly, when he didn’t know it was them in the first place, either!

God!

And then Chooch’s behavior began going downhill faster than Jersey Shore, so we began walking back to catch the trolley.

Putting on a show for the girls sitting behind me.