Cultural Event #18

Hipster Fest




It’s that time of year again… the Wicker Park street festival. We went on two separate days. Here’s a breakdown of what happened on each:

SATURDAY NIGHT
Get there after a long day of school. Like a couple of idiots, Kelly and I pay the $5 entry “donation.” We wander around looking for our friend Brenda, who’s with my friend Michelle and her friend, another Maya (who spells her name Maija to avoid confusion). She’s nice so I don’t hate her even though she has my name.

We marvel at the lack of hot men. Brenda seems to find hot men everywhere she looks, but her tastes are sometimes different than mine. For instance, she thinks white guys with blonde dreadlocks are cute. Ewwwww….

She tries to give the busboy at Pontiac Café a birthday kiss. He only lets her kiss him on the cheek since he’s totally smashed. She thinks he’s cute, but I think he looks like someone’s skuzzy younger brother, although he turns out to be turning 28 today. The bands all suck and the hipsters look gross. Towards the end of the night, some buggy-eyed guy starts chatting up me and the other Maija. He seems nice enough, but also appears to have recently taken some class to help him learn how to talk to women. I walk away, leaving the other Maija to deal with it. We decide to prolong the evening by going to a bar afterwards (we were plenty drunk by this point, by the way). On the corner of North, Damen, and Milwaukee is a group of performance “artists” who have dragged an electric organ out on the street. Two guys are playing the organ, and a third is barking through a traffic cone while wearing a suede dress. Right after they start, the police come and tell them they have to stop playing. We protest, but Johnny Law comes down hard in Chicago. I ask the group when their next performance is, but they don’t know. Apparently they’re an amateur group.

We decide to keep drinking for some reason, and head towards Michelle’s house a few blocks away. After one block, we see a taxi driver hit a girl on a bike. The noise is really quite shocking, and after a few seconds of writhing on the street, the girl gets up and starts kicking the cab. Instead of apologizing for hitting her or asking if she’s OK, the cab driver immediately starts yelling at her because she’s “wrecking” his cab. I’m sorry, but a girl in a short skirt and pink leggings who’s kicking the bumper of a cab is not going to do a whole lot of damage. Our group comes to her aid and starts screaming at him. It’s probably the worst nightmare of every Moslem, to have a pack of 5 American women screaming at him. The cab driver’s license plate is “666 TX” (I’m not lying). The girl turns out to be OK, and no one calls the police, although she said she might call the next day if her shoulder turns out to be totally fucked. We were backed up by a bum who witnessed the event as well.

We go to an afterparty at Michelle’s neighbor’s house. There are only three people there, one of whom is passed out on the couch. Keep in mind that it’s only 12:30 here – these people are clearly amateur drinkers. I express admiration at the gigantic television they have (a widescreen – perfect for watching movies), and the owner of said TV informs me that “it’s worth more than anything you’ve ever dreamed of owning.” I remind him that he doesn’t know me, along with one of my trademark withering glares, and he slinks off. We drink a good amount of their booze and leave.

On the way back we decide we’re dying for pizza. We stop in at the 7-11 where we witnessed the bike/taxi debacle. There’s a British man there, and Kelly and Michelle ask him where he’s from. He tells us he’s from Newcastle, and Kelly promptly starts to mimic his accent while following him around the store. I feel like dying from pure embarrassment, and beg her to stop, but she’s on a kick and doesn’t stop. The British guy seems pretty unfazed by the whole thing and somehow ends up paying for our frozen pizza. At this point I’m pretty sure I’m the most sober one of the group since I’m the only one with the sense to be embarrassed by Kelly’s bizarre attempt to woo the British dude.

SUNDAY
My ankle hurts from walking around all night, so I decide to stay home and watch TV all day. By 4 p.m. I decide it’s time to go drinking. We head back to the Wicker Park festival, and this time we wisely walk through without paying $5. We meet Brenda at the Pontiac Café again. This time the owner is there, and he decides he wants to get with Brenda. He’s a total old-school Italian mafia dude, wearing dark glasses, white pants, white sneakers, a white shirt unbuttoned halfway down the chest, and a gold medallion. I always wondered how the Pontiac didn’t get shut down by the Department of Public Health in spite of their ridiculous plumbing (one toilet is always overflowing at any given time) – now that I’ve met the owner, it all suddenly makes sense. Brenda was not interested in him at all, but we all drank for free all afternoon, which helped my no-money situation (or at least didn’t make it worse). The bands sucked again, but between bands they played Bowie’s Hunky Dory. The hipsters were out in full regalia, and I saw some unfortunate things, like a too-tight red tank top OVER a long-sleeve button-down white shirt. After drinking for awhile we wandered over to watch some soccer teams play, and then went to watch the basketball players. The basketball players were all black guys, except for one Asian guy wearing a dress and a crossing-guard’s vest. I recognized him because I had seen him earlier in the week. He doesn’t look like he’s trying to be a girl – he’s got muscles, and his legs are totally ripped. But last time I saw him he was wearing a dress and knee-high fishnets. This time, a neon dress, the vest, and a purse with a bunny on it. I have no idea how he got in with the African-American basketball-playing crowd. After awhile he left the game and I lost interest in watching.

We went back to Pontiac for their “Honky-Tonk Bingo” night. Although I usually hate bingo, I ended up playing for about an hour. I finally won one round (to the chagrin of my friends, who didn’t win at all). The bingo caller made a comment about my tits and gave me a CD as a prize. I haven’t listened to it yet, and I’m sure it sucks.