Casting Our Musical Fates to the Wind

Binghamton held Porchfest 2022, in the Abel Bennett Tract (a historic tract on the West Side of Binghamton, New York) Sunday.  Here's my Sunday post previewing it.

Each year was different.  This year was - a bit unexpected.  This is a bit long, so please bear with me.

But first, what is a porchfest?  It's a neighborhood celebration of music and the arts.  People open up their porches to musicians, who play half hour sets. (Some acts draw big crowds, well, big for a city of 47,000 people).   You wander until you find a band you like, or check the schedule and visit the bands of your choice.  Neighbors talk to neighbors. People run into people they haven't seen in a while.  

Our 2020 Porchfest was cancelled due to "it that will not be named", but in 2021 it returned to Binghamton, somewhat shrunken.  This year it was back and (I think) bigger than ever.  And we saw all of the above.  A lot of bands, a lot of porches, a lot of neighbors saying hi, and someone even thought we were a former neighbor of theirs (we've never lived in that neighborhood).

Before leaving home, we did a quick scan of times, acts, and places and decided on a couple of streets.

On the surface, Porchfest is unchanged from the last pre pandemic Porchfest.  People settled in front of an act they liked, or wandered up and down the street.  This year though, it was so big that a local hospital offered some of their lots normally unused on Sundays, and a shuttle system was arranged.  The shuttle was supposed to stop at the lots, and then was supposed to stop at several named locations in the performance areas.  In theory, not having to hunt up parking sounded great, especially as several streets were closed to traffic.

The reality was slightly different.

At a hospital lot, we gathered with others and waited.  We were all in a good mood.  The bus showed up.

I was expecting a school bus, or even a large golf cart (the literature talked about golf carts), but, to my delight, a city bus showed up. It was a hybrid electric, and it was air conditioned. 

Doesn't that look inviting?

We got on.  The bus took off.

At some point, after several twists and wide turns where the bus had to try to turn onto narrow streets with cars parked on both sides, we (and some others) realized the bus driver was not stopping at any of the concert drop off points.  

By this time we were far from the streets we wanted.  And, I was getting a vertigo attack, something I am prone to. (I've ridden city buses many times, and have no idea what caused the vertigo.) But I could barely see where we were going when it kicked in.  There was some kind of film on the windows of our bus which had an advertisement printed on it.  Maybe that had something to do with the difficulty.

Some of us called out for the driver to stop and told him he had missed some stops. Turns out he thought we would tell him when to stop.  We thought he would just stop where he was supposed to stop.  Isn't failure to communicate wonderful?

He finally stopped, we got off with much of the bus, and there we were. Fortunately, we knew the area although it was hard for me to get my bearings but we were pretty far from where we wanted to be.

Our musical fates were cast to the wind, so to speak.  I was in no shape to walk back to the houses hosting the acts I wanted to hear.   So we ended up listening to bits of several acts we hadn't chosen.

What had fate chosen for us?  If I told you The Parlor City flute Ensemble, a flute ensemble playing music from the 1890's-1930's, would you believe me? (We stayed for about 15 minutes and left only because I needed to move around).  

 

This may (or may not) be a group called Happy to Be Here.  They did seem happy...

After about an hour and a half of listening to several bands, I knew I had to go home.  We returned about 5:30 in theafternoon, which may be the topic of another post, because it deserves more than a paragraph.

Some houses had Ukrainian flags and at least one had a fundraiser for Ukraine

In the meantime, here's a couple of other pictures.  (I didn't take any videos, which I do some years.  I just wasn't up to it.)

I Could Wish I Had a Porch Like This One

Now, fast forward to today.  We were planning to visit the New York State Fair (some 80 miles/129 km away in the Syracuse, New York area away), to see Herman's Hermits.  But we decided not to go (alas). There are thunderstorms predicted in the afternoon starting at 1pm (the concert is at 1pm) and there is the possibility of severe weather.  Once the storms start, it's supposed to rain the rest of the day.  Spouse may have risked it if we lived in the Syracuse area, but we don't.

But, it's all good.

We've learned from experience that you may not get what you want, but sometimes what you get is just as good, in an unexpected way.

And who knows what I'll end up doing today, instead?