A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 

tourist season

July 4th kicked off the beginning of Ithaca's official tourist season.

Most of the cute bright red and orange construction cones have finally disappeared from the Commons along with the miles of planking, crime scene tape, swirling clouds of brick dust, leathery looking, Red Man chawing workmen shuffling around with their yellow hard hats and Home Depot tool belts, gigantic cement mixers and soul penetrating sounds of drills and sanders that provided a shrill, omnipresent chorus from hell all spring. But, you know, they still haven't gotten those damn yellow bricks right yet. Occasionally you see a commando unit of brick masons swoop down to rip out the same row you saw them laying last month. It's a work in progress. Like Ithaca. We may never get to Oz at this rate.

But the new street lamps that Mayor Cohen ordered from a Sears catalog sure look purty. They provide that nice gaslight village look, you know, and a hell of lot more light for drug deals too. Watch the crime rate go down. Hey, if you're stupid to go down on the Commons past 8 pm on a summer evening , you deserve to be the victim of a violent crime. All the stores have been closed for two hours. There's nothing down there except criminals and wastrels. No music, no clubs. Pretty soon the downtown bars will be closed too once the smoking ban goes into effect. Did they think that health nuts are going to come down to the Chanticleer to do calisthenics, munch wheat germ and drink Bud?

You have to admit that the Commons looks great this time of year. The trees are in bloom; the cops are decked out in their summertime shorts. Outside Juna's folks lounge around, drinking iced coffee at the sturdy forest-green K-mart grade tables thoughtfully provided by the Downtown Partnership. You are constantly reminded of that because of the large decals pasted to every single chair and table. It has a nice ring - the word 'Partnership' - not quite the same as 'dealership'. It conjures up pleasant image of merchants holding hands around a cash register, trading stories about markdowns past, exchanging rumors about the next business ready to fold, remembering all the 'partners' who moved on, leaving empty storefronts as reminders. Like tombstones.

And there's all the art. Raptor-like chrome birds of paradise, welded 1957 Chevy bumper gargoyles, metal roosters, wraith-like flames of stone , blue jungle gym abstract sculptures greeting you wherever you wander. Art everywhere. The offical Ithaca art crawl. The kindly Downtown Partnership even provides tourists with a map listing the sculpture installation around town. No. 18 is missing, however. Nobody can find old #18. It's called 'Closing the Language Door.' Try as hard as you can, you can't even find the Language Door, let alone close it.

Even the banks have sculpture. No, not the marble credit card megaliths you might expect but a statue of a chubby nude child hugging her confident, smiling dad, smiling because he knows that, by putting a little away each week, he'll one day be able to afford the $3.5 million it will cost to send the kid away to college. Wouldn't you know, the day Ez walked in to check his negative ATM balance, some local John Ashcroft has pinned a square post-it note right on the kid's fanny.

On July 4th , however, there was something missing in the picture. Besides the absolute absence of American flags, patriotic bunting, or anything indicating that you had just driven into to small town America on the 4th of July. Most of the stores on the Commons weren't even open. The Great American Holiday. Dozens of tourists strapped down with bandoliers filled with credit cards, 35 mm cameras, pepped up on raging consumer hormones, teeming all over the newly refurbished Commons with its gaslight village lamps - and only a quarter of the shops bothered to open their doors. And even the parking was free. Suddenly the vaseline-smeared images of the Downtown Partnership as pioneer businessmen of the future fade away and you're left with a foreboding sense that this might be a commie town after all. How American can you be if you don't even have a 4th of July sale? Isn't that what America's all about? It makes you wonder if you're not living in the USSR. Maybe it was reconstituted in upstate NY? You know, commissars, 5 year plans, collectives, the KGB, the evil empire, the whole nine. Maybe Ann Coulter's cronies got it right. Ithaca is the City of Evil.










Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:23 AM