Fraters Libertas

The Good Old Days

Earlier today, the lovely Atomizerette and I were enjoying the sights, sounds and tastes of the 30th annual Grand Old Day in St. Paul. For those unfamiliar with the event, it is sort of a mini-State Fair. Grand Avenue is closed to traffic for the afternoon and the street is lined with food vendors, music stages and those ever present balloon and worthless trinket stands.

Having religiously attended the festival for nearly twenty years running, I have seen it develop from its modest early days as a fun local event to what is now the largest one day festival in the Midwest. There we were, listening to the soothing psychobilly sounds of the Reverend Horton Heat and enjoying temperatures in the mid 70s under a brilliant blue sky with a cold Summit Grand in my hand. Could it get any better than this, I asked myself? Well, yes. It has been better than this.

Back in the good old days of Grand Old Day, beer was an accepted component of the event. I dare say it was even the main component of the event. It wasn’t rare back then to see people walking down Grand Avenue with a little red wagon in tow. Were there giggling youngsters on the wagon, you ask? Sometimes there were, but more often than not it was a keg of beer. A keg of beer surrounded by bags of ice and lovingly wrapped with a blanket to keep the late spring sun from heating up its shiny silver exterior and spoiling the sweet nectar within.

If you didn’t want to haul a keg around with you for the entire afternoon, there was no reason to fret. There were plenty of beer stands along the entire 2.5 mile length of the street. You could walk from one end to the other and never fear that even one step had to be taken without the company of an ice cold beer.

Fast forward to today. In order for me to enjoy a beer, I had to stand in line to buy a wristband after proving my age to someone ten years younger than me. Then, I had to stand in line and show my newly acquired wristband, which was already cutting off the circulation to my fingers, to several security guards in order to be admitted to one of the “festival gardens” (what ever happened to beer gardens?). Once inside, I had the privilege of standing in line again to buy a ten ounce cup of moderately chilled beer which had to be consumed within the confines of this overcrowded pen. These procedures come close to accomplishing the impossible: taking the fun out of drinking beer.

All of these “improvements” to Grand Old Day have evolved over the years to make the event more family friendly. Now, I’m all for family fun, but can’t we drunks have an event that is primarily for our enjoyment? Let the families have their Minnesota State Fair and Taste of Minnesota. Let them have their Valleyfair and Camp Snoopy. Enjoy them all with your kids, but please, let me have just five hours on a beautiful spring day to drink beer in the streets and listen to some free music. Otherwise, I fear that I’ll just lock myself in my house with a half gallon of Bombay Sapphire and pound glass after glass with the stereo turned up to eleven while cursing at the neighbor kids as they trample my lawn. I can’t be doing that in my 30’s. That’s what my retirement days are for.