Festival

Festival is to Grand Rapids, as Carnival is to Rio de Janeiro.

If you say "Festival" to anyone in town, they'll know you're talking about "Festival of the Arts", the big block party that takes place downtown the first weekend in June. It's been going on since I was a kid, and I've at least dropped in on it just about every year.

My favorite part of it in the early years were the Glue-In and the Paint-In. (Can you tell that this was started in 1970?) These are roped-in areas where, with minimal supervision, kids can play with paint or glue bits of wood together. Later I got more interested in the stages, where (among the high school dance clubs, amateur chorale singers, and instrumental enembles) some local rock bands get a chance to perform. Lately I've been more interested (like most people, it seems) in the food. They have a couple dozen tents where non-profit groups sell all sorts of different food for people to munch on while they wander over the several blocks that Festival now covers.

When I draw the analogy to Carnival, I'm not saying that Festival is just a smaller version of that. It's actually quite different from Carnival, in all the same ways that Rio is different from G.R. It's fairly low-key... one might even say conservative. Sure, there are oodles of people, but it's a relaxing atmosphere. And except for the food booths and the art sales, it's all free, and most of the work (including the food booths) is done by thousands of volunteers.

I like it because it really does bring together so many different kinds of people. You get your upper-class patrons of the arts, who ditch their ties and pearls and walk around like regular people for the weekend. It's a perfectly safe place for middle-class suburbanites to bring the kids, and the kids will probably enjoy it. There's no cost to show up and watch, listen, and even participate in the activities, so it's open to the poor (though they probably oughta bring their own food, since it's a bit pricey). The alienated teenage punks show up, though I haven't figured out where they've been congregating since their traditional hang-out area got paved over. It's even a good weekend for the poor and homeless, who can make a decent haul pulling 10-cent-deposit soft drink cans out of the trash cans.

The food booths serve as fund-raising projects for the groups that operate them, but they've also become kind of a celebration of multiculturality. The Islamic Center sells Pakistani chicken pitas. The Greek Orthodox Church sells souvlaki and baklava. The Sons of Italy sell Italian sausages. There are a few generic "American food" booths, so if you really can't cope with anything more exotic than a hot dog or a beef sandwich, you'll still be OK. But most of the booths have a clear ethnic identity, and it's usually not just a bunch of WASPs pretending to have a culture. It's stuff that Mom doesn't know how to make.

Probably about half of the booth operators are religious groups of some kind, and it's refreshing to see that it's not just a bunch of Dutch Reformed churches. In addition the Muslims (two booths this year) and the Greek Orthodox, there are Buddhists (selling vegetarian dishes, one of my favorites), African-American Baptists (selling BBQ soul food), a few WASP churches, a few Catholic groups, and the Free Spirit Worship Center (whose "walking garden" veggie pockets were a nice find this year). They don't appear to be doing it anymore, but there used to be a conservative Jewish congregation and a Calvinist Reformed church who shared a booth: the Calvinists operated it on Friday and Saturday (covering the Sabbath), and the Jews ran it all day on Sunday. It gives some encouragement to the idea that we can all just get along.

The organizers of the event try to include the whole spectrum of "the arts", such as poetry, cinema, theatre, storytelling, traditional visual arts, crafts, and so on, but those - by their nature - tend to be tucked away in buildings where they don't get as much attention as the food and the open-air stages. Which is OK, I guess. Sure it'd be nice if there was more emphasis on the "of the Arts", but "Festival" is what it is, and that's something good in itself.