With apologies to the Beatles, the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, and the state of Vermont.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Chapter Forty-One: The Spring Fling Concert

It rained the night before the concert and the communards worried about how muddy it would be and whether it would rain again in the morning.  Their worries increased when the day dawned cloudy and cool with plenty of patches of fog.  But by nine o’clock the clouds had almost all disappeared, the sun was shining bright, the sky was deep, deep blue, and the weather was getting warm.

The concert was to start at noon.  Bands started to set up.  Guitarists began tuning their instruments, drummers and keyboardists spent time testing out their sound, Dan and Cat checked out the microphones.

The farm stands were closed for the day and there was a makeshift gate put up at the beginning of the commune’s drive.  Marge, Ken, and Grace were out directing incoming cars to a field down the road, and Sal and Nancy were by the gate collecting donations.  Dozens of cars were coming by by ten but the communards really knew the concert was going to be crowded when, shortly after ten-thirty, a bus showed up with thirty people on board.  A second bus showed up a little after eleven.

By noon the field was packed and the crowd was ready for a show.  The Green Mountain Boys started the show with a bunch of their crazy punkgrass tunes.  They barely finished their set when the Krazy Kashas broke into a klezfunk frenzy.  Uncle Zucchini joined them for their last number (the two bands shared a bass player) and then took over with a slew of countrydelic covers.

Luna got a little concerned when she saw the sheriff and his two deputies show up but he waved at her and made his way up to where she was standing.

“Don’t worry,” he said in the relative quiet between songs.  “I’m not gonna worry about what anyone’s smoking today.  We’re just here to catch some tunes.”

“Whew,” said Luna.  “That’s good.”

“How late are you planning on running this?” The sheriff looked right at Luna.  “That could be a bigger problem if I had to deal with complaints about noise from the neighbors.”

“We were only planning to run until ten pm, maybe ten thirty with encores.”

“Okay,” the sheriff said, as the next song started up.  “But try not to let things go past that time.  I don’t want to have to come by and tell you that you have to shut things down.”

“Gotcha,” Luna said.

By the middle of Uncle Zucchini’s Band’s set the weather was getting quite warm and people were dancing away.  Lots of folks started taking their shirts off and one young woman took off her shorts as well and started dancing naked.  Pretty soon she had a half dozen men dancing around her, at least two of which were also naked.

Everyone seemed to be having a good time, everyone that is except maybe Wahina, who Luna spotted with a large suitcase dragging Birch with her toward the parking lot.  Luna made her way over to them.

“Are you leaving?” she asked Wahina.

“Absolutely,” Wahina said.  “I thought this was a farm, not a nudist colony.”

She kept moving toward their car but Birch made his way back to Luna long enough to say, “Don’t worry. I’ll be be back again next year--with or without my mother.”


                                                      *


By the time that Amazon Angels came on (“For womyn, by womyn, and about womyn”) it was getting late in the day.  

Ken, Marge, and Grace had cooked up a vegetarian feast which they were distributing for free to the participants.  Nancy and Will and Darren, however, were selling pastries, cookies, and sweet snacks which were in high demand.  What the commune was losing out in the expense of the vegetables they were more than making up in income from all the sweets they were selling.
The Amazon Angels were followed by Luna’s friends’ band who called themselves Sweet As Syrup.  They were a trippy spaced out hypnobeat group and they soon got everyone more than a bit wired and almost to being tranced out.

Tinkerbell and the Rubyfruits woke everyone back up, however, when they played their brand of acoustic rockabilly with a ecoqueer twist.  The sound from their water jug bass started echoing off the barns in neighboring yards.  The music shrieked and pulsed and kept folks dancing away even as it began to get dark.  Luna started worrying about the sheriff and the neighbors, especially when she realized that everything was running way behind schedule.

But the final group was the Fae Whispers, the band that Darren had recommended, who had a soft, sweet, almost gossamer sound.  It was just what everyone needed to mellow the night out.

Although the Fae Whispers kept playing until almost eleven, none of the neighbors complained--in fact, a couple of them (not including Peter who was at the concert) said that the music was just what they needed to get to sleep that night.  The only complaints were from concert patrons who said that they had a hard time getting up and leaving when the music finished.  Several concert goers tried to convince the BBAAers who were helping close up that they could sleep in the fields.

It was well after midnight by the time the communards got the last of the festival goers out of there and got themselves to bed.

But they were all up bright and early the next morning, taking down the festival stuff and breaking down the stage.  While Sal and Dan were directing that process, Luna, Marge, and Nancy were counting up the take.

“Unbelievable,” Luna said when the group gathered for lunch.  “We made almost a thousand in donations at the gate.”

“Not too bad,” Viv said.

“But wait,” Nancy said.  “We made another thousand in sales of all our sweet treats.  We’re completely out of flour and sugar.  We sold everything we could make.”

“Whoa,” Dan said.  “I guess I’d call this concert a success.  It certainly exceeded my expectations.”

“We’re going to have to do more of these,” Ken said.

“But not any time soon,” Luna said.  “We got a lot of other work to do.  We’re a farm, remember?”

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