Pull out your hankies, fellow ‘benders, because this will be my final blog. Tomorrow is my birthday, and I want to start the celebration early by demoting myself to regular attendee so I can enjoy myself like a normal person instead of reporting.
I could easily do as I’ve done in previous years and write about the fireworks. But if you’ve ever read a description of a pyrotechnic display (even one as magnificent as Riverbend’s finale), you realize that, no matter how extravagant the language that’s used, it still just a lot of words about things going “pop” and “bang.” No thanks. Next year, perhaps.
Instead, being a veritable resident of the riverfront during the course of the festival, I am bound to see and absorb more instances of the bizarre or noteworthy than I can possibly find room for in my column. So instead of the aforementioned onomatopoeia, I’ve dug through my notebooks, and assembled a list of five nuggets of wisdom gleaned from my Riverbending experience.
1. Men apparently will seize any excuse to show their stomachs to the world. The moment it got remotely hot (which was the second I left my apartment), I saw guys strutting about with sweaty navels on display for all to see. It didn’t seem to matter if they were in shape or not (most were more pot than belly, as a matter of fact).
Whether they realized it or not, they were all breaking the rules, as outlined in the festival pamphlet. The first line of the terms of admission reads: Shirt and shoes are required. (That’s listed before the restriction to weapons, by the way.) Then again, there’s an obvious loophole in that it doesn’t say you’re required to actually WEAR the shirt, just that it’s required. So maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s clever, not gross.