ROMEO PEACH FESTIVAL

I have been so busy for the past several weeks that I almost forgot to post about one of the most exciting events of the summer. I have a few moments now so allow me to share with you the tale of THE ROMEO PEACH FESTIVAL.

My dear friend Angelina Langoustine, who grew up in Romeo, graciously invited me and Stavros to join her at the festival and stay overnight at her parents’ house. She had invited me the previous year, too, but I declined, largely because Romeo seemed unknown and distant. But I have discovered that nearly anything can be endured with Stavros by my side, and in fact many otherwise horrible experiences are made fun by his presence alone, so I figured what the hell?

So one lovely Friday evening, we loaded up the car with provisions and headed north. The plan was to have a dinner party with a handful of other folks then hit the festival. So we brought a salad and some wine and Angelina was providing a big pasta dinner, and the other folks were bringing appetizers.

Romeo wasn’t nearly as far as I thought but the trip included one roundabout so it seemed like we had traveled a great and harrowing distance, which is all I ask for in a getaway. Exiting the freeway deposited us in the center of a very charming little town. There were people crowding every street corner and parents dragging children by the hands down sidewalks and old people eating hot dogs and teenagers shoving each other and tipsy-looking twenty-somethings everywhere you looked. We turned right at the main intersection, which was appropriately located at Main St and something else street, and drove slowly, looking left and right for the Langoustine family house.

I should mention that Starvos and I have similar family backgrounds. Our families are both middle-class working folks from east Detroit. We live modestly. Our parents live modestly. And we are neighbors with Angelina Langoustine, so imagine our surprise when we located the address and pulled up into the driveway of a house that looked like this:

“This explains a lot,” I commented to Stavros, referring to Angelina's surplus of belongings and expensive tastes.

“No shit,” he murmured, mouth hanging open as he took in the property.

Because I wished to appear familiar with this casually wealthy scenario, I headed straight for the back door, where I was sure the kitchen was located.

“Hullo!” I called, in what I hoped was a vaguely British upper-class tone. “We’re here!”

Angelina was at the stove in the vast kitchen, wearing an apron and stirring a pan of browning meat. There were bottles of wine and plates and napkins and silverware out and I could tell she’d been working all afternoon. She turned to greet us, a big smile on her face.

We put the bags down and she took us on a tour of the house. I do not exaggerate when I say that the house I grew up in could fit in their living room. The ceilings were 16 feet high. The floors were inlaid wood in geometric patterns. Stained-glass window panels hung in doorways. Multiple sets of stairs led up, down, zig-zagging into basements and attics. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like growing up in such a house. Turns out I didn’t have to try very hard, because when Angelina led us to her old room, I noticed that both her and her sister’s room, where we were quartered, were virtual shrines to their teenaged selves.

We went back downstairs and people began arriving. Angelina’s anorexically-thin sister and her silent husband. Angelina’s friend the psychiatrist and her husband of 17 years. Mallory and Evan, a couple recently married. Alice and Mark, a boyfriend/girlfriend team who seemed to be experiencing some just-below-the-surface tension. It was a decent mix and everyone was in good spirits and we ate and drank wine and after peach pie and ice cream we walked the couple of blocks to the peach festival.

There was plenty to see on the street even though it was pretty dark. There was an overabundance of teenagers everywhere and they all looked identical. The girls wore way too much eyeliner and the shortest possible shorts with flip-flops. They were also uniformly bronze in a very unnatural way. The boys just looked like douches, the way teenaged boys everywhere look. We passed an old church that had been converted to a halfway house for the mentally impaired.

“Where are they halfway to?” asked Stavros to no one in particular.

Finally we reached the fairgrounds. To call the scene before us idyllic would be accurate, but there was something so alien about the cleanliness and wholesomeness of what we were seeing that Stavros and I both found it a little eerie. We were instantly separated from the rest of our group and began walking from attraction to attraction, trying to figure out how we’d spend our tickets.

First was the fun house, which really was fun. If you’ve never bumbled around a thirty-foot-long mirrored maze chasing a dozen drunks with corn-dog breath, you don’t know what you’re missing. We giggled and bumped our way out of there and headed over to the children’s roller-coaster. This is the sort of roller-coaster on which a new mother might feel secure placing her newborn; a smallish, low-altitude affair with minimal twists and turns. Nonetheless, Stavros and I screamed as if we were in a 747 plunging toward the Earth at a thousand miles an hour.

Next was the legendary Tilt-A-Whirl, a boring, jarring clunker of a ride that I suspect has only survived the festival circuit for so long because of its endearing name.

The best ride was the last one we rode before running out of tickets: Cliff Hanger. This is like that ride with the swings, only instead of swings, it’s got a board you lie on facedown and a bar that comes down to hold you on, so you’re sort of flying, or hang gliding, around in a circle. This was the pinnacle of our whole experience, this five-minute ride. Stavros was in the chair next to me to my right, and I was in the outside chair.

“STAVROS!” I yelled once we took off, and he looked over at me, laughing.

“WE’RE FLYING!” he yelled, and laughed some more.

Around and around we flew, swerving high and low over the faces of people on the ground waiting in line, seeing and hearing the whole fairground in a panorama of short-shorts and blinking lights and grinding gears and Taylor Swift and fallen flip-flops…finally the Cliff Hanger screeched to a stop and we staggered off. The carnies were all South African and mean. You said thanks to them and they looked at you like they wanted to rip your lungs out. We bowed courteously and scurried out the gate to find the rest of the gang in the beer tent.

Once inside the beer tent, I realized that we were in the midst of a giant all-year Romeo high school reunion. Thankfully everyone wanted to repair to a local saloon so we elbowed our way out and walked to a bar. It was during this segment of the evening that some of the couples in our group began to lose the ability to conceal their hostilities with one other, and Stavros and I decided to head back to the Langoustine house for the night.

We slept in Angelina’s sister’s room in twin beds we pushed together, and in the morning, went to a little diner for breakfast. The Romeo-ites were already out in full-blast festival mode so to cap off the trip, we took a quick stroll through the park hoping to catch the pie-eating contest. It was the first Saturday of the month, and so the tornado siren was going off. We had to shout to talk, and as we passed the petting zoo, I noticed all the animals were walking quickly around in a frenzied circle, heads bent low.

“They don’t like the siren!” I yelled to Stavros. “We gotta get out of here! This is freaking me out!”

Suddenly the eerily idyllic nature of the festival began to suggest only one thing to me and that one thing was David Lynch.

We hustled our asses back to the car and hugged Angelina goodbye and got the heck out of there.

It was probably the best night of the summer.

PS For those of you who think that the festival pictures above look a little seedy, it’s because they were actually taken at the Michigan State Fair, which is not in Romeo and is not at all idyllic, unless you grew up in Sarajevo.