When I mentioned on Facebook that I would be skipping muggy Zilker Park and the ACL Music Festival this year to visit my parents in Houston, one reader suggested it would be, historically, the first trip to Houston in order to escape humidity.
Really, it was a matter of survival.
The only musical advantage in this setting is the social thrill of sharing the concert with thousands of ecstatic fellow travelers.
Otherwise, these mass gatherings are not primed for socializing either. Virtually everyone is a stranger.
You meet people, but mostly you talk strategy, tactics and logistics, almost as if part of a military campaign. How far to this stage? Which way the shade? How long until the sun sets?
The food and drink, though local and tempting, are not consumed in ideal conditions.
One music fan, also skipping this year, described his customary festival movements as inscribed in an iron triangle between beer stand, concert stage and potty stops.
Now one could easily kindle a weekend-long buzz at the festival, but alas, that option is not available to working reporters from mainstream media.
So why have I attended so often? It is a huge party, so inherently interesting to a social columnist. And I flatter myself that my reporting has, at times, been useful to the newspaper’s ACL team.
Yet if I examine my motives more honestly, I went to say I had done it. And survived.
Stupidly, insanely, I even volunteered while I suffered from a since-fixed heart condition.
Think about it. How do fest-goers mark the previous decade of musical glory? The mud fest and the dust fest. The hurricane year and the really hot year.
It becomes “Survivor: ACL.”
This does not take away from the astonishing achievements of the C3 organizers and their army of staff and volunteers who keep dozens of bands pepped and on time, scores of vendors stocked and in business, and tens of thousands of fans safe, healthy and, for the most part, happy.
My ACL break allowed me to spend precious time with my family and to race back for Marshall Kuykendall’s 80th birthday party at the delectable Rolling in Thyme and Dough in Dripping Springs. Some of the most diverting people from the Hill Country attended.
I guess that, at age 58, this is more my natural setting: A breezy night eating buttery sandwiches under old oaks while talking with people about several lifetimes of personal adventures.
Photo: Guillermo Hernandez Martinez