Pour Me A Story, Vol. 32
feat. Maine nostalgia, Rhode Island nostalgia, and...peaches?
greetings pals, how are we ahead of this long weekend?
it’s unfathomable that we’re already facing down Memorial Day Weekend (which, for my non-American readers, is the unofficial start of the U.S. summer).
every year around this time I think back to my very first Memorial Day Weekend as a permanent resident, which was the 2014 edition. I had just past the six-month mark of my time in Maine, and with winter finally having released its grip on the northeast, I was much more confident about setting out to explore on my own.
a long-time buddy of mine, a guy who ran the drunken coach tour I traveled on during my first trip to the U.S. back in 2008, happened to be coming through Maine over the holiday weekend, albeit with a tour of actual grown-ups. we arranged to get together in Bar Harbor, where he kindly shared his hotel room at no cost and took me out drinking once he’d made sure his tour group was well fed and back at the lodge.
it was roughly around this point in my immigration that I had fully realized I might never go back to Australia on a full-time basis, and weekends like that one served to cement my mindset. when I got back to Hallowell, my little spot on the map in central Maine, I parked by the river and sat in the trunk of the Outback, sipping a beer and reading a book, and felt like I really was home.
if you ever get the chance, Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park are well worth the trip. I’ve been lucky enough to get there a handful of times over the past few years and it’s a truly gorgeous part of the country.
Sure Am Hungry
speaking of the summertime, once we passed that Memorial Day Weekend in 2014, my thoughts immediately jumped ahead to September. on my commute home from work at the Kennebec Journal every night, I would look off to my right as I drove over a highway overpass and look at Interstate 95 South stretching out ahead of me.
I-95 runs from northern Maine all the way up to South Florida, but I wasn’t anticipating riding it for that long, just down to Providence, Rhode Island, on the Thursday after Labor Day.
as luck would have it, I managed to land my first real job in the U.S. mere hours north of the site of my first actual job in the U.S., the Rhode Island Seafood Festival. I used the last two vacation days of my blossoming newspaper career to undertake a weekend of backbreaking manual labor.
but let’s take it back a step, and maybe even let 2014 Adrian tell the tale.
In early 2012, I stayed for a weekend my buddy TJ, who’s a born and raised New Yorker. At one point during my stay, he gave me a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of his fledgling project, the Rhode Island Seafood Festival. The inaugural event, in September 2011, looked like an absolute blast in the photos I’d seen on Facebook, but I hadn’t had the vacation time or the cash to attend.
But about 25 beers in, on that cold January afternoon (man, I’m so dramatic), I told him that I definitely wouldn’t miss the 2012 edition.
Sure enough, by the time March rolled around, I was single, fed up with work and itching for another U.S. vacation. I’d already planned a two-week jaunt to Vegas with a couple of buddies for late August, but since the seafood festival was in mid-September, I decided to bust all of my accrued holiday time and just stick around…for like another month.
I made my arrangements to spend a couple of days in New York City before heading up to White Plains to meet TJ mid-week and hitch a ride up to Providence, RI, where the festival goes down. I had figured I’d just be enjoying a Saturday in the sun, drinking beers, eating seafood and listening to live music in a park with a waterfront view (which basically foreshadows my first summer in Maine.) However, from the very first night I linked up with my favorite Irish-American festival operations manager, I was very quickly corrected.
As it turns out, being 6’2″ and 210lb and in solid shape meant I was PERFECT for a little bit of hard labor. Over the next couple of days, TJ and I, and his business partner Dan, were all over Providence and Rhode Island, distributing hundreds of festival flyers, filling rental vans and trucks with pallets upon pallets of booze, emptying other trucks loaded with rental tables and chairs, marking out India Point Park for the vendors to set up in, and all measure of other organizational things.
As festival day rolled around, so did the storm clouds, and we all anxiously turned our eyes to the skies early that morning to hope and pray the sun would keep the rain away. Sure enough, we ended up with glorious weather for the second annual Rhode Island Seafood Festival.
After getting the beer tent built and functional, I figured my “work” was done. TJ’s brother Andrew was set up behind the bar, so I grabbed a beer and a scallop roll and proceeded to enjoy all the aforementioned good things about the day. For about half an hour. I went back to the beer tent and found Andrew buried (figuratively) under a ton of thirsty customers.
I hadn’t done any bartending, or even bar-backing, since my college days, and even then it was just a two-week stint at the Rugby World Cup, but I asked Andrew if he needed a hand. He replied in the affirmative, and that’s where I spent the rest of the day and well into the evening. But that didn’t mean we didn’t have the best view in the house, and the opportunity to bullshit with the customers, drink on the job and enjoy perks like delivery lobster rolls just made it all that much more fun.
I worked harder that day than I think I ever had, and once all the festivities wound down, we still had to pack it all up. When it was all said and done, TJ thanked me for my efforts and said he couldn’t have done it without me. And that’s when I made the aforementioned promise:
“You’ll never have to again brother.”
And that, fellow readers, is what put the wheels in motion for me to really, seriously figure out how the hell I was going to make sure that I could be back for RISF every single year going forward. There was only so much chance to take vacation from my job back home at the same time every year, so I figured immigration would be it.
just like we did ourselves, the festival grew and matured from the “one-day, free-to-attend, bunch-of-buddies-throwing-a-party-in-a-park” vibe we had the first couple years. we moved to a 2-day event in 2013, started charging $5 for entry in 2015, and in 2018 we held the Rhode Island BBQ & Blues Festival and the Rhode Island Music & Arts Festival as well.
we ran three events again in 2019, learned some lessons, got ready to make some adjustments for 2020, and then…well, you know what happened. what was slated to be the 10th annual seafood festival was deflated by the global pandemic. we still arranged for a couple of our longtime restaurant vendors to bring their food trucks in the park, where people could eat at a safe social distance, as a way of giving back to the Rhode Island community that has supported us for a decade.
this year though, baby? we’re coming back and virtually nothing can stop us. we’re starting to make our arrangements to get ticket presales live again and get stuck into the (surprising amount of) work required to hold a two-day festival. it’s always been one of the highlights of my year, and it’s one of the foundational pieces of my desire to immigrate here, so I’m simply thrilled that we can get it going again in 2021. if you’re in the northeast, we’d be very happy to have you!
the 2021 Rhode Island Seafood Festival will be held at India Point Park in Providence, Rhode Island on Sept. 11 and 12 from 11am to 7pm Saturday and 11am to 7pm Sunday.
If You Like It Then You Shoulda Put A Wing On It
there’s nothing particularly thought-provoking about this segment; in fact it’s incredibly dumb stuff. but it made me laugh this week, so I figured I’d include it.
I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of working out every day, after a couple months of stagnation. on Monday I ran out of time to get a workout in before baby bedtime and dinner, so I took a walk to the grocery store to stretch my legs.
as I was walking home, I turned to consider the business which replaced the former Little Caesar’s pizza place that once stood beside Wing Stop in the local strip mall. when I noticed it was in fact a vet, a funny scenario came to mind, and I posted it (somewhat ironically in itself) on the bird app. anyway it turns out some other people thought it was funny too.
Worthy Consumables
y’know, I’m really drawing a blank here this week, so I’ll just stick with the seafood festival theme. ever since my first festival, the absolute standout menu item from any of our vendors is Shuckin Truck’s scallop roll. just behold this thing.
that’s grilled scallops (four, maybe five!), grilled bacon, shredded lettuce and wasabi mayo in a toasted hot dog bun. you will absolutely not find a better sandwich in the northeast than this one, and I’d stake my reputation on it. come by this September and see for yourself.
Parting Note
in the absence of a special guest, this week I’m left to choose the song myself again. because I’m a creature of habit, I’ve been chewing on the idea of listening to one album a week from my formative years and, while maybe not reviewing it, letting the nostalgia take me back to the period in my life during which I listened to it.
I dunno if anyone actually cares to read about that (let me know in the comments!) but this is one of the songs that has been stuck in my head ever since I came up with the idea.
thanks as always for tuning in this week, pals. I hope your Memorial Day Weekend is safe and spent with loved ones and cold ones. but please do not drink and drive — if you need a ride, just reply to this email and I’ll send you $10 for an Uber. seriously.
— adrian ✌🏻
Glad to hear the the festival is back this fall!