One of the great things about the Internet, since no one’s ever pointed this out, is its capacity for providing instant gratification: accurate or not, information is current and instantly available! This is how I like my gossip. It’s not really how I like my bills, but we take the good with the bad over here. In the spirit of being relevant, I’m going to dive into my favorite weekly summertime event, the Concerts in the Park series.
The last one is tomorrow—we made it just under the wire.
The series features our wonderful municipal band, which specializes in movie themes, the official songs of each branch of the U.S. military, and everything in between. I’ve been going for years—decades, actually. The band visits five parks, each one on a specific day of the week, for two months. I’m not going to lie: my park is super awesome, and Thursday is the best night. This need not be taken with a grain of salt.
The concerts bring together some of my least favorite things – picnics, socializing, and prolonged clean-up – and make them into something wholly enjoyable. The adults wander around with glasses of wine, feeling, if they’re anything like me, a little giddy from doing the most illegal thing most of us will ever have the guts to do. (“Alcohol is prohibited in city parks,” comes the ominous but ineffectual announcement each week. “Please be circumspect in your actions.”) The little kids run around with dogs, balls, plastic weaponry, and a wealth of other accessories unsuitable for a crowded place. And we eat.
Apparently, back before my siblings and I were born, my parents would make tasty pasta salads the night before a concert, tuck them into unstained Tupperware, and cruise on down to the park unencumbered by mountains of deck chairs, yards of picnic blankets, and place-settings for five. My, how things have changed!
These days, of course, we bring enough gear to see us through Coachella. Our menu, though much different from those halcyon pre-children days, has been consistent for the last few years: homemade submarine sandwiches, deviled eggs, chips, fruit, and brownies. My mom, who is a teacher, has long been stuck with almost all of the preparation because she gets home from summer school in time to, well, prepare. Needless to say, she was getting kind of sick of it. So we have progressed to the best possible kind of picnic food: purchased.
Tomorrow we will be curled up on our deck chairs and picnic blankets, drinking wine, eating fried chicken, antipasto, potato salad, and strawberries. And it will be, as always, wholly enjoyable. Anyone who’s bored can see how many Crate and Barrel picnic tables they can count from a sitting position; my record is nine.
