A Beginning and an Ending

[captainsblog]

Two very different things going on this weekend. The one that began will only be getting better in the future. So, I’m pretty sure, will be the one that ended.

In our Western New York summers, that are beautiful but relatively short, a ton of different activities get packed into every week and especially every weekend. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, there is always a game, a concert, an exhibition or especially a festival to attend. Some, like the Allentown Art Festival that Emily participated in this year, have been fixtures for decades. Others pop up spontaneously, while others still seem to be in a state of flux after the pandemic really messed with and their planning for several years.

One of the longer running street festivals around here occurred in late August in the neighborhood anchored by Elmwood Avenue. There were stages for performers, tents for vendors and many culinary options from Elmwood restaurants and food trucks. A few months ago, the longtime sponsors of this event announced they would be calling it off this year. They had lost too much time and opportunity cost to the years they could not host the event due to COVID, but the association of merchants on Elmwood stepped in a few weeks later, to announce that they would take over the timeslot and organizing, albeit under a slightly different name and without the legacy of the previous ways of doing things.

The two guys who run our poetry readings every other week in the heart of that neighborhood, at Caffè Aroma, announced to us a few weeks back that they would be coordinating with the EVA (the new sponsors at the Elmwood Village Association) to put on a full schedule of highlighted poetry readings on the venue’s  main stage. Ben and Justin also told us that day that they and others from the group would be staffing one of the tents for books, artwork and other merch from any poets caring to sell there, a mere poem’s throw away from Aroma’s grounds at  the corner of Elmwood and Bidwell.

By the end of the previous weekend, the arrangements were pretty much in place. About a dozen of the most prominent published poets from the group would be taking slots on the main stage for an hour at a time, with musical performers alternating the other hours. Very dear friends of ours were scheduled for the beginning and end of the Sunday schedule. But that's when things started getting a little weird.

Apparently, the organizers on the music end of things had invited back performers who had worked the festival under the previous organization's sponsorship, which had paid them for their appearances. Whispers turned into rumors and then turned into published articles about whether the musicians were being taken advantage of, as often happens in the for-profit music scene here and elsewhere. “We won’t be paying you anything, but think of the exposure you’ll get!“ If this sounds familiar, you may have heard it in a movie about 40 years ago:

After a day or so of grumbling, one of the restaurant members of the EVA, only on the Avenue for a few years but very supportive of the music community, stepped forward and promised to pay the musicians at least something for showing up on the stage. That, in turn, only led to other complaints from other performers. At the reading this past Wednesday night, at least one of them in our poetry group questioned the fairness of anyone putting on a public performance and being expected to do it for no compensation beyond the elusive “exposure.” I never did find out if anyone else got actual commitments for payment beyond the musicians, but those poets did take the stage, and I did buy several of the chapbooks on offer at the table, including two from newer members of the group who haven’t really established himself in the broader community yet.

I also wrote a poem about it, which I’m considering giving a read to a week from Wednesday night:

First came the musicians, who’d been paid before and wanted to get paid again.
But the organizers found a way to pay them, for they were musicians who deserved what they were worth.

Then came the dancers, who said to the musicians, “Why are they not paying us but paying you?”
So the organizers found a way to pay them, too, for they were dancers who deserved what they were worth.

Next came the poets, who said to the musicians and the dancers,
“What is THIS bullshit?
They don’t pay us but pay you?!?
But we do haiku!”
And the organizers did some more organizing and found a way to pay them, too, for they were poets who deserved what they were worth.

The standup comedians walked into a bar.
“Give us money- PLEASE!”

Which is when the organizers said, “Wait, we’re spending way too much of our own time organizing here- THAT’s worth something! Let’s pay everybody, including ourselves, because we all deserve what we’re worth! Since we’re out of sponsors, let’s just sell tickets to the thing so we can pay everybody!”

Whereupon Ticketmonster entered the conversation. “Tickets? Did someone say tickets? We’re the exclusive ticket distributor for the entire City of Buffalo for anything involving sports or the arts! So give US those tickets so we can add order fees and processing fees and convenience fees and printing fees and fee-fees so we get paid what WE’RE worth!”

And so the $150 tickets went on sale, with dynamic pricing making most of them $1,000, and the audience said, “Fuck we don’t have that kind of money!”

So now there are tumbleweeds along the former festival grounds, and a SPIRIT OF HALLOWEEN sign stretched across Bidwell Parkway.

But everybody got some exposure.

----

We wound up leaving a little later than expected to see some of our friends read on Sunday, because Eleanor decided that was the perfect time to finally make the investment in a new power tool for work outside the house. I dropped her off on Elmwood just in time to catch the reading from our friend Brittany, and we stayed a bit after that to talk with her, her boyfriend and the other people at the table. We then headed home;  I’d spent more than the usual amount of time outside myself the day before , much of it up an extension ladder cleaning years of accumulated crap out of the gutters behind the house. I was feeling so ambitious afterwards that after we got back, I decided to take on one other project.

Our washing machine was a wedding present from my in-laws, probably arriving before the day of the event 36 years ago next month. We’ve gone through at least four dryers, three dishwashers and any number of smaller major and minor appliances, but that old Sears Kenmore was still crankin' after all these years. Its closest brush with death came a few months after Zoey arrived in the summer of 2009 and promptly wedged herself between the edge of the laundry tub and the side and bottom of the machine. We had to pry the top off to get her out, and that required disengaging the electrical wire running to the little button that stops the agitator if the lid is up.  After a few unwise science experiments with electricity, we called a local, fairly reliable repair place, which came out and pushed the old girl (the washer, not the cat, who's still here 14 years later) into the next decade.

The wash still washed, the rinse still rinsed, the timer and cycles still timed and cycled like they should. For a few weeks, though, the spin cycle never seemed to get all that spinny. We'd see it in action, and soapy water coming out of the discharge hose, but it was taking extra runs of the spin cycle to get the clothes even remotely close to not being dripping wet.  Yesterday came my brilliant idea. I'll bet the hose is plugged with lint! I'll clean that sucker out!

"The hose" has inside and outside components. Removing the outer part running to the discharge sink was easy, and a bit of H2O dripped out of the bottom of the connector. Aha! Hypothesis confirmed! Then it was off to the hardware store for, wait for it, a Drain Weasel.



Hair, lint, whatevs. I assembled, inserted, weaseled round, put it all back together, tossed a couple of towels in for a low-water test run, waited, and....  minor flood.  There was mopping (there would be moping later, by both of us), there was further investigation of how the hose on the inside had become detached while Wally Weasel did his thing, there was an inability to put Washy back together again. I gave up, resolving to call, in order, a neighbor friend who might help (out of town), that same local repair company (which diagnosed it instantly over the phone as an irreparable bad spinner clutch), and finally Home Depot to surrender and give up on the old beast.



There 'tis, sitting down there in Appliance Hospice, morphine running through the intake hose as she awaits imminent death.

In addition to the multiple dryer companions of both electric and gas variety, it outlasted two moves,  the 1991 ice storm, the 2006 October storm, assorted floods and outages and even Zoey's 2009 divebomb down under the basin.  That was reparable. This time’s failure to spin the load past first gear? Not.

So meet the new guy, as simple and basic as we can imagine and scheduled for Saturday delivery:




Still top loading, no wifi connection to the Internet of Things so it can go sexting with the toaster. The maximum five-year purchase protection on it, which is about all they build these things to last anymore anyway. The old one was always one last gearshift away from death, so I'm glad it happened in the summertime and with finances relatively in order.

There remained the issue of the Load In Progress at the time it became an ex-washer. The laundromat at Sheridan-Harlem, the closest major intersection to our house, was always our go-to when the power went out or a dryer failed. It's also the one where, during that self-same October storm in 2006, I took my then laptop to steal their wifi during a Mets playoff game and I dropped the damn thing, rendering it useless until my then computer guru rebuilt its hard drive and motherboard into an ersatz desktop "Frankenputer" that lasted for years. 

Alas, this time my long time go-to laundromat had turned into a gone-to. Not even a trace of the place in the plaza. The landlord is turning its spot,  and the old Global liquor space next door (they took over the bigger abandoned Chuckie Cheese space on the other side and resisted my when-drinking suggestion of retaining the games and ball pit) into a swim school for kiddies. At least they have the water supply for it. 



It's not open yet, though, so tossing the load in the deep end with some Tide pods was not an option. I hadn't been to a laundromat other than that recently departed one since my first year in Rochester, so I struggled with remembering where I might go. In college, when the one available set in our building was broken, I either snuck back into the dorms or we'd go to a nearby commercial laundromat with Jesus tracts as the reading material. We called that one the "First Baptist Laundromat."  On arriving in Buffalo, I'd use one north of campus near the dear-departed Rooties, then later either the cleverly-named (and still in existence) "Washingtown D.C." on Bailey, or my favorite, the "Three Sisters Laundromat" that I renamed the Three Witches Laundromat after that Scottish play of some ill repute:

Double double, toil and trouble,
Dryer burn and washer bubble.

That one's long gone, too. I settled on  one called Reid’s in the village across a side street from our former church. I told Eleanor that's as close as I’m gonna get to setting foot inside with the Methodists anymore.

Comments

[weofodthignen]

Poor old washing machine. Glad you managed to replace it without getting an internet-enabled one. And at least its failure mode wasn't what my mother managed with 2 washers in succession in the 1970s: flames shooting out the back. (Must have also been lint; my father didn't believe it the first time, but was home the second time to see it.)

[warriorsavant]

Many moons ago, when I lived in Portsmouth NH, my then SO was a musician. Local huge RE company wanted to put on a festival and was going to pay the performers in .... EXPOSURE!. We told them when they gave away free houses for "exposure," she'd play music for the same rate.