One of my daughters had a bright idea for a Mother’s Day present: take Mom to the St. Mary’s Knights of Columbus Crawfish and Bluegrass Extravaganza. Dad was invited, too, fortunately, and had a great time.
In case you don’t know, the crawfish (as you can see from the pictures turned up by Google’s image search) is a sort of very small fresh-water lobster, 2-4 inches/5-9cm long. I’ve not been wildly enthusiastic about them in the past. They’re an awful lot of work and mess for a fairly small amount of food. There’s one bite of meat in the tail, and it’s not easy to extract, especially if you’re inexperienced and arthritic like me. And you pile up a lot of shells and guts and slime in the process, not to mention having your hands and arms covered in very fishy-smelling liquid. Doing this in a restaurant is not my idea of fun. But here, it didn’t matter how messy and clumsy your technique was—you could make as big a mess as the job requires, and nobody cared, because they were all doing the same thing, the place was set up for it, and it was all going to be hosed down afterward. You get a big aluminum-foil pan, about the size of a big lasagna dish, containing a couple of pounds of crawfish, and sit down at a long table with a plastic cloth over it, and have at it along with several hundred other people. The crawfish were delicious, the beer was reasonably priced, and the thoughtful Knights had even provided Yuengling for those of us who don’t care for Miller Lite etc.
The bands played under a gigantic live oak, at least four, maybe five, feet (1.5-2m?) in diameter. I only really heard the last two bands, the Jason Boone Band and Fat Man Squeeze. Bluegrass music is not something I sit and listen to very often at home, but I really enjoy hearing it live. Both bands were excellent, though all in all I liked the Jason Boone Band a little better: they were straight-up pure bluegrass, with a good mixture of gospel, which I like. Fat Man Squeeze had a more rock-and-roll approach, taking a style which is already very fast and tight and amping it up even more—a little punk, maybe—which sometimes seemed a bit much. You can hear both bands at their web sites (links via their names above).
I love stuff like this: a festival of music and food, where people of all ages, from babes in arms to old folks in wheelchairs, are at ease, where you can have a few beers and hear some good music and generally enjoy the vibe of people having fun with nothing dark or ugly about it. It’s great that a Catholic organization puts it on, though I guess the presence of alcohol may taint it in the eyes of our Protestant friends.
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