International Fair Makes Orange Circle Center of the World

The distant sounds of a merry crowd--music and laughter and shouts--rolled down Orange Street on Saturday afternoon where they ran smack into old Jimi Hendrix songs pouring out of a portable stereo on Jake Goetz’s front lawn.

The crowd noise came from the city of Orange’s annual International Street Fair, which organizers say could draw 800,000 people before it ends at 10 p.m. today, well ahead of the 600,000 people it drew last year.

But Goetz, who lives three blocks south of the traffic circle in the heart of Orange, was having his own little yard fair. Just him, a cooler of beer and, for a while, anyway, the music of a dead rock hero.

Yet the real entertainment was in the street.

“It is kind of funny watching people trying to find [parking] spots,” Goetz said, sipping from a can of beer before adding it to the small pile of empties between his cooler and his lawn chair. “I’ve seen the same car go back and forth tons of times. . . . The crowd just gets bigger every year. That makes it more fun. The more people, the better it is.”

For the most part, faithful fairgoers said, there was little new to the street fair this year. But that familiarity is part of the draw. The core elements--food stands and beer tents, ethnic music and pop-rock bands--were there again, augmented by a wide array of booths hawking everything from temporary tattoos to earrings to, at one table, face-painting and advice for women with unplanned pregnancies.

“We did really good last night,” Ginger Banko of Orange’s Living Well Clinic said late Saturday afternoon as a small stream of people stopped to look at a display of plastic fetuses in various stages of development. “I think it’s because of the models and the brochures and the face-painting.”

For Lisa Eckman and her daughter, Clairese, 6, the continuity of the Street Fair allows them to make it an annual day trip. They drive in from their home in Corona and meet Eckman’s mother, who lives in Garden Grove.

And each year they wind up in the German area of the festival, where Saturday Eckman and Clairese performed something akin to the jitterbug as three men in green lederhosen--called Europa--ripped through a jarring rendition of the Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night.”

“This is the third year in a row we’ve come to listen to Europa,” Eckman yelled as the trio--guitar, drums and accordion--slipped into “Beer, Beer, Glorious Beer.” “Clairese has won the chicken dance two years in a row.”

*

For the most part, the public comes for the dancing and partying, petting zoo and craft booths. But for the organizers, the fair serves as a key fund-raiser for local nonprofit organizations that get to keep proceeds from food and drink stands their volunteers staff.

The best money, say those who know, is in the beer concessions. So those are rotated annually.

Last year Bob Saucedo, 50, sold beer to raise money for La Purisima Catholic school in Orange, where two of his kids attend classes. This year, the fourth year the school has staffed a booth, the school drew the sausage straw, Saucedo said.

“Things are going pretty good,” Saucedo said as students and parents cooked and filled orders, a cool breeze dissipating the blue plumes of grill smoke. “The first year we did food, we made about $3,000. The following year we had the beer booth. We made about $15,000. . . . The money is definitely in the beer.”

For Goetz, the day was given over to having fun, not making money. A couple of hours after the Hendrix music ended, he was listening to something indecipherable from the ‘70s and the pile of empty beer cans had grown higher.

“I have a couple more beers to go, then I’m going to a party at my friend’s down the street and then we’ll walk downtown and have a bratwurst,” said Goetz, who heads back to college at UC Santa Barbara next week. “A few beers and a brat. . . . To tell you the truth, this is my favorite part of the year.”