The Fourth: a time to wave the flag for hometown pride
For all its multicultural pride, Los Angeles is absolutely the best place in the country to celebrate the Fourth of July. It may lack actual historic landmarks associated with the holiday -- your Statue of Liberty, your Independence Hall, your Ft. McHenry -- but while such things may translate well into T-shirts and snow globes, they aren’t really symbols of the birth of this nation.
No, Fourth of July is all about our endless, and often inexplicable, longing for small-town America. Fourth of July is about red-white-and-blue bunting scalloped from store windows and front porches, about lemonade stands and picnics under the spreading chestnut (or eucalyptus) just off Main Street.
Fourth of July is about watching parades mercifully free of enormous balloon Bullwinkles or floats made entirely of black orchids and sunflower seeds. Instead, there is imperfect baton twirling by high school color guards, perspiring local pols waving from antique cars and old fire trucks, cowgirls jingling by on palominos and every VFW member who can remain mobile for 10 blocks under a July sun.
From Pacific Palisades to Monrovia, Huntington Beach to Ventura, parades and street festivals will draw Southern Californians, including Angelenos, out of their urban mind-set and into a mysterious time and place when building a house two miles from the courthouse was considered living “outside town.”
Of course there will be indisputably local color -- the Falstaffian acrobatics of the motorcycle cops in the Palisades parade, the leather-clad Harley riders in Huntington Beach, and no doubt some of this year’s festivities will mark with fervor the Supreme Court decision regarding gay rights.
But for 24 hours, including fireworks, we manage to transform ourselves from the second-largest city in the country into a loosely laced group of hometowns, the sort you might find in central Indiana or southern Pennsylvania. Wandering at twilight through the festival in La Crescenta, amid the Girl Scout booths and the classic carnival rides, it is hard to imagine you are two minutes away from three major freeways, 20 minutes from downtown and West Hollywood.
We are able to pull off this identity switch convincingly for many reasons. We’ve got the props: red Radio Flier wagon from Toysrus.com, blue gingham tablecloth and picnic basket courtesy of Restoration Hardware, matching plastic cups from Target. We’ve certainly got the talent -- if nothing else, Hollywood ensures that Los Angeles will always have more face-painters, balloon-animal artists and people willing to dress up as Uncles Sam per square foot than any other place in the country.
And we’ve all got our parts down. Because lately we’ve had a lot of practice.
Just as the patriotism stirred up in recent years by tragedy and war has made flag bearing and wearing a year-round fashion, summers in the city have increasingly become infused with the Independence Day image of America. The first local herald of spring is no longer the jacaranda, it’s the farmers market, which with its kettle corn, gingham crafts and general down-home air, extends the Fourth of July way into late autumn.
According to Marsha Roe, editor and publisher of Craftmaster News in Downey, farmers markets have been spreading across the L.A. area like wild mustard, creating instant Main Streets wherever they are. In fact, she says, street festivals are on the decline, many put out of business by the new farmers markets, which are easier to put up, to tear down, police and contain. They are also less about whatever theme a street festival might have and more about a parochial image of America.
“It brings the town together,” she said, “and onto the street where they can see the local merchants. It makes a community feel safe, proof that they can bring their families out.”
But for all the peanut shells under foot, today’s farmers markets are not exactly like the ones small-town natives might remember -- try to find a peppermint-stick lemon or baked goods that differ in any meaningful way from what you might see in a Starbucks, even on the Fourth of July. Roe, who has been putting out Craftmaster News for more than 20 years, also gives seminars for folks wanting to break into the arts and crafts world. She has watched the scene leave Mom and her rhubarb cobblers and Pop and his hand-carved birdhouses choking on dust and too many city permits.
“It used to be people did a few crafts, sold them locally, just for a little extra money,” she said. “Now it’s a business. A very competitive business. Now the food vendors are involved in a big way and everyone’s doing the same thing -- kettle corn started selling, so now you see kettle corn stands outside the supermarket. It’s crazy.”
If this adds a Potemkin village air to the local line of sweet corn and strawberry jam, there is still something reassuring about seeing the same vendors, and often the same consumers, week after week. If they aren’t quite the seasonal field-side stands of our youth, the tables and tents offer a closer relationship with the farm or the orchard than do the slick-floored, misted-cooled produce sections.
And they reflect our larger cultural longings. Right now, Roe says, modern beats country, but vintage is very hot, as is “anything heritage,” including red-white-and-blue teddy bears and patriotic lawn ornaments.
In a region where the state fair looks more like Disneyland or the capital city of an emerging nation, we all need some sort of festival that will bring us all together, but in groups smaller than, say, the Million Man March.
So it’s not surprising that Fourth of July has spilled over into May, June, August and September. No fireworks, no parade, but plenty of corn on the cob and lemonade and the chance to put down the burdens of the metropolis and play at small-town life for an hour or two on a summer’s day.
