Just Cured - Experience Fine Foods

In this city, the highlight of the summer social season for most of the population is not the Opera; rather, it is the run of Church Festivals. I have met people who plan their summer travels around the festivals of the parishes they grew up in or those festivals of the parishes to which their friends belong.

The format is fairly uniform — cheap beer and picnic foods, carnival rides, raffles, bake and other sales and games of skill and chance. Note that this description is from a festival ignoramus. I have spent perhaps six hours total at church festivals over the past 30 years.

And of those six hours, three of them occurred last evening. I attended the performance of the band Snidely Whiplash at the St. Martin of Tours Festival held at Harvest Home Park, Cheviot. For those of you too young to remember, Snidely Whiplash was the arch villain in the Dudley Do-Right series of cartoons on the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show from my youth.

In the present time, Snidely Whiplash is a cover band performing as a hobby of the members, each of whom has another full time gig. The band leader, guitarist and co-lead vocalist is my across-the-street neighbor Tony Scalia. His son, Pete, plays the keyboards and shares vocal duties. For a gang that performs perhaps a half dozen times a year, they are quite in synch with each other and are enormously entertaining.

That’s Pete on the far left and Tony next to him.

The crowd at the festival spanned all categories, from young to old, from hale to infirm, and included people of virtually every economic means. By the second set, the crowd had played enough games and drunk enough beer to be more interested in the live music. People started dancing in place, they way they do when they want to hit the dance floor but no one else has yet headed there.

It took a bit of encouragement from her mother, but one young lady hit the floor before any others. And she wore the asphalt dance floor out. She hit the stage, played tambourine, sang backup vocals and lead a dance troupe of her friends. She was unknown to the band members and virtually all of the crowd when the evening started. By the end of the night, we all knew Caitlin — and will remember her for some time.

Caitlin, keeping time for the band:

Here she is singing a duet with Pete:

When I last saw Caitlin, the band had rolled into a slow medley of Jackson Browne’s Load Out and Stay (Just a Little Bit Longer) and she had asked her mother for the last dance. Caitlin had her head tucked onto her mother’s shoulder, and was sound asleep.

This is for all the Caitlins out there who know how to have fun on a Friday night.