The annual Taste of the Danforth weekend, a tribute to Hellenic culture, where one can enjoy samplings of Greek cuisine and music, sport and performance, surrounded by a street festival atmosphere in the largest Hellenic business community in North America.
Except every year it runs during August when it's a gazillion degrees and the Air Quality reading is off the scale anyway and half the city makes their way to Greektown, packs themselves into a sweaty mass of sunburnt manfat and bad boobjobs and waddles the Danforth Strip from Broadview to Jones** stuffing their gobs with barbequed meat on a stick.
The locals flee, those who can. And local vegetarians? Even the most polite of them who normally wouldn't get in people's faces about their dietary choices have a really fucking hard time. It's an out of control meat-fest shrouding the neighbourhood in clouds of smoking animal fat, clogging the subway stations with slowmoving over-stuffed carnivores (and their kids), and making a general stinking mess of the otherwise pretty streets.
Ever seen Souvlaki on the sidewalk the next day once all that grease coagulates?
And who hired that crackerjack creative team this year for the posters and banners? A vaguely mediterranean-looking woman in a white sheet gazes vacantly at a sword skewered with little pictorial icons of Hellenic culture, such as a lyre, an urn, a soccer ball, and pint of beer (well, don't look at me), something red, and a chunk of burnt lamb.
The only good thing*** about the Taste of the Danforth weekend is the early mornings before the fat-splattered barbeques have been fired up and no one's around, but the street is closed and so you can walk down the middle of the road and only see like a bicycle or something. That and the cute rookie cops they always haul out for special occasions. Ooh Mary.
* This is Tonia's name for it. I was just calling it Taste of the bloody Danforth. Lame. I know.
** Jones now is it? Fuck.
*** Okay okay they've raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Toronto East General Hospital.
2 comments:
"Out of control meat-fest." Sounds like my kind of party.
I remember when Taste of the Danforth was called the Greek Festival and was packed into the confines of the old Varsity Stadium on Bloor Street.
My nanny, Anne, a buxom lass in her early 20s who had come from Ballygalley, Ireland, to take care of us, and whom I lusted after as thoroughly as any 11-12 year old boy can possibly lust after a woman with whom he has absolutely no chance in hell; my nanny, Anne, was dating this Greek guy, Chris, and most of the time their relationship consisted of her instructing me to answer the telephone in her stead and in order to tell Chris that she wasn't home and, no, I didn't know when she would be back.
Chris was a man of the 1980s, with his full on acid wash denim look and his curly black hair always teased out to the maximum with hairspray; his curls dangling down his back in a stylish mullet. In retrospect I can understand why Anne could only stand the guy in spurts…but at the time he seemed pretty cool to me.
All this artful dodging aside, Chris did shell out the big bucks to take Anne to the Greek Festival, and (probably less willingly) agreed to let her drag my sister and I along. Just as it is now, the festival was marked by blaring bazooki music and the wafting aromas of sizzling meat. The smoke from the barbecues was trapped in the bowl of the stadium and hung over the crowd like a surreal fog; I remember that one could hardly see from one side of the stands to the other for all of the smoke and the people milling around below on the field came and went from the pork seared mist like surreal visitors from the Odyssean afterlife.
There was some kind of rocket ride, too. A rocket like all rockets in the early 1980s, done up on the outside with red and blue sparkly paint and lots of little yellow light bulbs running along it's body from nose to tail. Inside, locked in a cylinder stinking of old piss, a little screen on the inside tip of the cone would show us flying away from the earth and into space, being attacked by alien forces, and then safely coming back down for a landing on the hydraulic flat-bed truck—while in the air we pitched and turned as we flew through space. I was 12, and I thought the whole thing was fucking retarded, plus, like I said, it smelled like piss.
I don't think they have the rocket anymore (safety standards and all) but they still have the meat. I used to live at Coxwell and Gerrard so I was pretty in tune to Greektown and to the Taste of the Danforth, but generally I thought of it as a nuisance and skipped out on it. I'm not a vegetarian, as you know, but I still managed to develop a similar distaste for the whole event.
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