Season of the Pig

New York City summer street festivals have taken a turn for the worse over the years, becoming so ubiquitous and generic nowadays, it's tough to get excited about them. From the 6th Avenue Summerfest, the Park Avenue Summerfest, the Murray Hill Festival, the Lexington Avenue Summerfest, New York street festivals have become a formulaic weekend event that offers little other than giving New Yorkers cramped in their studio apartments a reason to go outside and providing unaware out-of-town drivers the unlucky fortune of spending an additional forty-five minutes getting across town. At any festival, you'll find the same ol' bag o' shit- street vendors pushing leather wallets, tube socks, cheap jewelry, t-shirts with inciteful messages like "New York Fuckng City," framed photos of the Brooklyn Bridge, refrigerator magnets in the shape of fruit- and food vendors selling cornbread and mozzarella sandwiches, sausage and peppers heroes, zeppolies, gyros, and lemonade.

So it's ever so refreshing to find a festival that adds a little more. And when I say more, I mean more beer, more greasy unhealthy food, more hordes of people goodness.

You know it's summer in the city when the repugnant scent of hot garbage begins to compete with the magical scent of cooked farm animals smothered in barbecue sauce. As was the case this weekend with the 4th Annual Big Apple Barbecue Festival coming to town.

Beyond the crowded food lines for the ten-plus barbecue pit masters: from Texas to Nevada, from North Carolina to....131st Street, the mood was festive, the beer was flowing, the bands were jammin' and the BBQ was finga lickin' good. Bringing the overweight South to the overweight Northeast, it was a grand ol' time. However, for next year, I would only attend again if they improve the food service line operations, considering that even those poor schmucks who purchased 'express passes' for $125 bucks seemed to have waited just as long as us lay folk. I would have been much more upset with the lines except that my less than sharp server mistakenly gave my friend and I four additional whole pork sandwiches, instead of the two waters we had requested. As I slyly left the line with my free booty, convincing myself that the long wait and the over-priced $7 plate justified my in-action to alert the vendor of his mistake, and feeling like a total fatso with 4 extra meals, I couldn't help but be reminded of Popeye's Wimpy: "I'd gladly pay you never for 4 pork sandwiches today."