Our Tradition
Festival of The Arts is a weekend long event in Grand Rapids, Michigan full of art, music, films, dance, and plenty of food. Started in 1972 with three stages and some various booths in the heart of the city it has grown into the “largest all-volunteer festival in the world”. Not bad for a dream conjured up by a few hippies in a small town.
I’ve been attending Festival, as the locals refer to it, with my parents since I was born. For as long as I can remember my parents have volunteered with a stage called The Outer Fringe the most consistently folky and acoustic stage at the event. Every first full-weekend in June I would eagerly anticipate our family excursion to downtown.
As a young child my mother would take us to the kids’ events: the glue-in to build creative constructions of wood and glue, the paint-in to create our own Picassos, the storytelling tent where adults (sometimes even my Mom) would tell tales of places far away and times long ago. In-between we would return to The Outer Fringe as Dad MCed and Mom would volunteer painting children’s faces. We would play on top of air-vent grates which would turn our shirts into balloons, or send any paper product into soaring flight as the vents cycled air out of stuffy office high-rises. I was a Festival kid and this was my playground.
Saturday evening at Festival was the climax of the event. At nine o’clock my father would play for a crowd of everyone I’d ever known (or so it seemed). My mother would dress nicely and talk with all the family friends. She would ask us to come over and meet so-and-so and who-his-name, and if I was lucky their kids. I would play, my father would play, it was the symbolic beginning of summer and our best family tradition.
As I got older I might have considered rebelling against this “family oriented event” but instead it became a symbol of the new freedoms I wanted my parents to allow me. As I aged I wanted to walk around the six or seven blocks of Festival on my own or with my friends. I wanted to go to the rock and roll stage, see the movies, and “hang out”. Besides there were cute girls at Festival and who wants to be seen with your parents when there’s cute girls around? My parents reluctantly allowed me to venture further and further from The Outer Fringe with instructions to “check back in”. So The Outer Fringe became home away from home - the place I always came back to.
Even as a teen Saturday evening was still the best part of Festival. I would invite all my friends and we would sit and watch my father as he entertained the crowd with improvisational songs, heart-felt commentaries on our culture, and jokes about Festival the retelling of which would turn into had-to-be-there moments. My friends were consistently impressed. My Dad and his songs always seemed to be from a different era. The songs seemed timeless but not old, somehow modern but not trendy, maybe even ahead of his time. The song he wrote for Curt Cobain weeks after he died comes to mind or his song Being Young which I believe he wrote the same year. Some how my Dad subtly let me and my friends know that he had been teen without being presumptuous about how he “knew what we were going though” or trying to be “cool”.
Now it’s Sunday night and another Festival has just come to an end. This was the first Festival I’ve attended with my wife (she came with me last year as my fiance). It was just as fun as ever. Yes, some of the magic is gone. It’s a lot smaller than when I was a kid, a lot less rebellious than when I was a teen, but there’s a new sort of magic forming. The kind of magic that comes from beginning a new tradition. I spent some time playing with one of our friend’s kids and imagining what it will be like to bring my own to the glue-in, the paint-in, The Outer Fringe. Maybe they’ll remember their Dad playing each year for everyone they’ve ever known.
My Dad played last night at nine o’clock for his twenty-eighth year. I played the open-mic slot I’ve been doing right before him for about four or five years now. There aren’t as many people I know in the crowd anymore but they all know who my Dad is. He the guy that still makes up songs on the spot and sings out his heart about the things that keep him up at night. On Friday night I was kept up by a song that needed writing just like my Dad. I worked into the wee hours of the night until I had written a song for my Dad. On Saturday I asked my Dad if I could play one song during his set. I played Look Up for him and all the people who’ve been coming year after year to be part of a tradition. A tradition I hope we can keep for a very long time.