The Great Astoria Get-Together. One Day Only.

This weekend I got a little surprise. Not in the usual form of a medium-sized cockroach sweeping through my peripheral vision while I'm peeing, or the rare sight of a pizza delivery man running his bike into a parked car (which is GOLD as far as the surprise scale goes), but in the form of a street fair.

One of the busier streets in Astoria is Steinway Street, a thoroughfare noted as much for the abundance of restaurants and gold retailers as for the amount of garbage lying in the street. Imagine my surprise when, instead of tripping over a pile of old newspapers, I tripped over a group of small, unsupervised children high on cotton candy.

Nothing says Spring like the sight of hundreds of people milling through the streets pushing double-wide baby strollers and gawking at tables of discounted "NEW YORK FUCKING CITY" t-shirts, velvet paintings of the World Trade Center, and sickly turtles in plastic cages. Which are only $2 apiece, a real steal of a deal.

I caught the tail end of summer 2005 in New York City, and wandered through a few random street fairs in Manhattan, most of them boasting grilled corn on the cob or Philly Cheesesteaks. Apparently in Astoria we get the stinky street fair. I think the general odor was coming from the fact that there were entire deep fried chickens for sale next to the regular street meat vendors, who were blowing their smoke all over the Mister Frostee Truck, which was towering over the smoothie stand, which was throwing its refuse on the hot pavement next to the obese tattooed cholos who were giving away free parakeets with the purchase of a birdcage. Then again, it could have easily been the large number of shirtless and hairy men standing in a crowded street mingling their man odors.

In a way, it reminded me of the Minnesota State Fair, but only if you replace the farm animals with a box of puppies for sale, and replace all sorts of tradition and family fun with a table selling bulk thongs and socks. People were lining up for the bulk socks in numbers I've only seen line up for deep fried cheese curds. But besides those differences, and the fact that the street fair only spans the length of two avenue blocks, it was generally the same: large amounts of large people moseying about and taking anything that is free. I didn't see any free yardsticks, but I couldn't tell you how many people were already sporting their free lanyards and plastic bracelets. Oh, and they did sell deep-fried Oreos, something I had claimed to a Long Islander the night before was a delicacy exclusive to the Minnesota State Fair.

By 5 o'clock, the unsold socks and the unfried meat was being packed into unmarked 15-passenger vans, leaving behind candy wrappers and empty soda cups, fliers and pizza boxes. In other words, leaving things just the way they found them.