Week 2
Anne Arundel County’s calendar is generously sprinkled with fests and festivals. There’s the First Sunday Arts Festival, the Arts @ the Park Arts Festival, the Art in Action Street Festival, ArtFest, and the Annapolis Arts Crafts & Wine Festival. There’s the Fall Craft Festival and the Fall Harvest Festival. There’s Rocktoberfest and Annapolis Octoberfest, not be be confused with West Annapolis Oktoberfest held the following day or the more idiosyncratic Oktubafest held on October 17 at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold. The Captain Avery Museum hosts an Oyster Festival while the Benson-Hammond House hosts a Strawberry Festival, which I hope includes an homage to Captain Queeg. There’s the Annapolis Fringe Festival and the Annapolis Film Festival, the Annapolis Greek Festival and the Annapolis Irish Festival – which is actually held in Crownsville.
On Saturday, September 12 alone, Anne Arundel County hosted at least six fests and festivals: the Maryland Renaissance Festival, the National Treaty of Paris Festival, the Maryland Seafood Festival, the Rose Play Festival, the Annapolis Craft Beer and Music Festival, and SustainaFest, featuring a student-built Tiny House. Or at least Anne Arundel County was supposed to host six festivals. In the midst of an unusually dry summer, on Saturday heavy precipitation blew through every couple of hours like a soggy Acela. The county should have hosted a Rainfest. Before the day was over, I would attend two of the six scheduled festivals, so I can attest that at least some of the events proceeded more or less as planned.
Just as the morning’s showers were ending around 11:30, I set off for Sandy Point State Park and the Maryland Seafood Festival. While this is the 48th Maryland Seafood Festival, it was my first, I was amused by the festival’s slogan – “Savor the Bay” – which seemed like a clever play on the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s “Save the Bay” motto. And I was particularly looking forward to the Crab Soup Cook-Off and a crab cake eating competition, all of which I planned to attend before heading to the National Treaty of Paris Festival in the evening. But the seafood festival turned out to be insufficiently festive to stay that long.
When I arrived at Sandy Point State Park, the Chesapeake Steel Drum Band was playing Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” followed by the Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman.” I’ve always enjoyed steel drums, a musical instrument that traces its roots to surplus 55-gallon oil barrels in Trinidad. The steel drum is a bit of an anomaly – a percussion instrument that produces melody instead of rhythm. The notes the steel drum plays are particularly sonorous, with a lingering spectral echo. Still, the band’s performance failed to draw me in, even with the visually arresting backdrop of the Bay Bridge stretched out behind the stage. Maybe it was the song selection. There’s no law that steel drum bands have to play reggae and I’ll give them a pass on Morrison, but a 43-year-old swamp rock tune? Maybe it was the arrangement, with a drummer playing rhythm on a standard drum kit at times overpowering the band’s seven steel drum players. Almost certainly, it was the audience, which wasn’t large enough for a decent pickup basketball game. Rows and rows of folding chairs sat empty except for small puddles of rain pooled on their white plastic seats.
The Irish have a wonderful term for the electric feeling of a successful social event: the “craic.” (Being an Irish word, “craic” isn’t allowed to be pronounced as it’s spelled or spelled as it’s pronounced; it sounds just like “crack.”) The Maryland Seafood Festival’s sodden music venue was the anti-craic.
It was a short walk from the stage to the tent hosting the Capital’s Crab Soup Cook-Off. Another $10 on top of the $10 gate price (plus $10 to park at Sandy Point State Park or $5 to park off-site and be bussed to the Park) bought you admission to the tent, a plastic spoon, and three marbles. The marbles were used to cast ballots for the best cream of crab soup (the most heavily contested category), Maryland (or vegetable) crab soup, and alternative crab soup.
The tent was crowded when I first arrived. It came oh-so-close to obtaining the craic when some of the restaurants began running out of samples to taste and the crowd started to dissipate. Running out of soup may have cost the Federal House Bar & Grille the People’s Choice award in the cream of crab category. Theirs was easily the best – not too thick with generous portions of lump crab meat and a hint a sherry. It won the Judges’ Choice award, but couldn’t compete for People’s Choice votes during the second half of the event because they had no soup for you – or for anyone – by that point. The Doubletree Hotels’ Ports of Call restaurant won the People’s Choice cream of crab award, with a potent swig of Harvey’s Bristol Cream sherry poured right from the bottle into the taster cup as it was handed to each patron. The Harvey’s may have been just the right lubricant to get marbles to roll into Ports of Call’s ballot box.
The People’s Choice and Judges’ Choice awards diverged in the other two categories as well. Baltimore’s Costas Inn won the Judges’ award for best Maryland crab soup, while the People’s Choice award went to perennial winner Superior Catering by M&M of Linthicum. The judges gave the best alternative award to Skipper’s Pier Restaurant & Dock Bar in Deale for their exceptional crab bouillabaisse, served with a baked baguette round topped with rockfish and clam, managing to pack both Maryland’s official state fish and state crustacean into one small taster cup. The result was worthy of an Iron Chef competition. The People’s Choice alternative winner – Nestlé’s Minor’s division, which sells ingredients to restaurants – was also excellent. Their sweet potato and crab bisque featured coconut milk as a prominent ingredient, giving the bisque a subtle taste that didn’t overwhelm the crab flavor while providing a smooth mouth feel.
I didn’t learn of the cook-off voting scandal until long after I left the seafood festival. The marble ballots for the People’s Choice awards were measured by weight. After the winners had been announced, the Capital later reporter, volunteers discovered ballot box stuffing: they found two oversized, heavy marbles among the regulation marbles that had been used for the voting. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t make clear whether the unauthorized marbles were in one or two ballot boxes or whose ballot box or boxes they were found in, though the article indicates they had not been cast for one of the ultimate winners. When you can ply the voters with Harvey’s Bristol Cream, you don’t need to stuff the ballot box.
Everything after the cook-off was anti-climatic. Before the cook-off’s winners were announced, I roamed through the festival grounds. An “Annapolis Crab Derby Race” still hadn’t started 15 minutes after the scheduled post-time. The rain was better at keeping its schedule, redampening the ground two hours after the previous showers ended.
I wandered back to the stage, where AJ Smith and the Apollo – complete with de rigueur laconic bass player in addition to a keyboard player and drummer – were pumping out an awesome indie-rock set to almost no one. As Smith and his band finished with his pop anthem for his home borough – “Brooklyn Nights” – I felt embarrassed that my adopted hometown couldn’t muster more than a smattering of spectators for such a talented musician. Smith somehow managed to deliver a high energy performance despite the absence of an appreciative audience – or any real audience at all. To add insult to injury, the festival’s schedule misspelled his band’s name. How hard is it to spell Apollo? Did I mention that I’m embarrassed?
After the Crab Soup Cook-Off awards and an excellent skewer of scallops grilled by one of the many seafood stands on the festival’s grounds, I returned to the stage area where a much larger audience than had turned out for either of the bands awaited a corn-on-the-cob eating competition. Watching the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest on ESPN (no, it’s not a sport) has become a Fourth of July ritual for my family but I had never seen a competitive eating contest in person. Eight competitors took the stage to see who could eat the most corn on the cob in two minutes. While the winner was James Page, a gregarious gentleman from Bowie in a USMC t-shirt and Redskins ball cap, media outlets from New York to Kentucky actually provided coverage of the woman sitting next to him – Mandy Kadlec – for her zestful corn-eating technique.
After walking down the beach to get a closer look at the Sandy Point Shoal Lighthouse – and with more than an hour to go before the crab cake eating contest – I decided to abandon the festival just as plump raindrops started to pummel the park.
The second stop of my September 12 festival hopping was the National Treaty of Paris Festival — which sounds a bit grandious. I mean, are there regional Treaty of Paris Festivals?
For about 8½ months from 1784 to 1784, Annapolis served as the nation’s capital. Congress sat is what is now the State House’s Old Senate Chamber. There, two significant events occurred: Washington resigned his commission on December 23, 1783 and Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris, which officially ended the Revolutionary War, on January 14, 1784 (though British ratification wouldn’t occur until April 9, 1784).
Before attending the festival in that treaty’s honor, I picked up my friend Phil and we stopped for dinner at Stan and Joe’s on West Street. When in Rome, eat as the Romans do. Phil, a visitor from Alexandria, understandably wanted seafood during his jaunt to Annapolis. We didn’t have an abundance of time before we were due at St. John’s College’s Francis Scott Key Auditorium. Stan and Joe’s was a perfect solution. Earlier in the day, I had tried taster cups of Stan and Joe’s Maryland crab soup and cream of crab soup at the Capital‘s Crab Soup Cook-Off. My one-word review from a soup-stained page of notes from the Cook-Off: “meh.” But Phil enjoyed his crab cake and we both enjoyed our beers. Phil ordered a draft Raging Bitch IPA brewed by Frederick, Maryland’s Flying Dog Brewery, which applies canine-related appellations to many of its beers (“Doggie Style Pale Ale,” “Double Dog Double IPA,” “Dogtoberfest Marzen” – you get the idea). Or at least Phil kind of ordered a Raging Bitch. He actually just ordered a draft “IPA,” leading Erin, our congenial waitress, to assure him, “That’s alright, hon, you can say ‘Raging Bitch’ to me.”
On to the National Treaty of Paris Festival, which I will dub the NTo’PF for ease of typing. Events had been going on all day, including lectures and movies at the Maryland Inn and carriage tours of historic Annapolis – assuming the horse wasn’t washed away in one of the day’s squalls. For the festival’s event event, around 70 people were gathered in the Key Auditorium; 70 also appeared to be the average age of the attendees.
The evening event had two parts. First was a lecture by Rand Scholet, a former IBM consultant and Dale Carnegie instructor who has created an “Alexander Hamilton Awareness Society,” followed by Christopher Lowell in the guise of Benjamin Franklin. Scholet was an engaging speaker; it was mentioned before and after his presentation that he used to be a motivational speaker – though he never once referred to living in a van down by the river. But the content of his PowerPoint-aided presentation was out of synch with both the contemporary zeitgeist and the audience. Who is now the nation’s hippest Founding Father? That would be one Alexander Hamilton, the subject of a hip hop Broadway musical that has wowed the critics and attracted huge audiences, including President Obama and the First Daughters. Obama told Jon Stewart it was “phenomenal” – it doesn’t get much hipper than that. Sure there’s a move underway to take Hamilton off the $10 bill. But that is leading to Hamilton being further extolled as he’s compared to the $20 bill’s Andrew Jackson. That p.r. duel is likely to end better for Hamilton than did his actual duel at Weehawken.
Yet, despite the buzz and adulation Hamilton is currently receiving, the point of Scholet’s lecture is that Hamilton’s role as what he characterizes as George Washington’s most important collaborator is underappreciated. September 2015 isn’t the right time for a Hamilton-isn’t-getting-his-due lecture. Nor was the presentation particularly well-suited to the audience. Anyone who chooses to spend a Saturday night at a Treaty of Paris Festival is probably smarter than the average bear when it comes to American history. So Scholet’s supposedly surprising facts about Hamilton likely surprised no one. At the end of his presentation, he also whiffed on a sophisticated question by someone who was probably a history professor concerning Scholet’s methodology for a particular taxonomy he offered.
Far more successful was Christopher Lowell’s portrayal of the man on the $100 bill. Speaking as Franklin himself, Lowell engagingly described Franklin’s successful diplomatic mission to France without which there would have been no Treaty of Paris. Without France’s assistance, which Franklin was instrumental in obtaining, there would have been mere vanquished colonies with no separate nation for Brtiain to enter into a treaty with.
After the presentations, Phil and I adjourned to the Treaty of Paris restaurant’s Drummer’s Lot Pub. We assumed it would be full of NTo’PF patrons. Instead, we found it bereft of customers. After a quick – and quiet – round there, we traipsed up to Church Circle and down the stairs into Reynold’s Tavern’s basement, home of the far livelier 1747 Pub. Like the Maryland Inn, Reynold’s Tavern was already in business when the Treaty of Paris was ratified, though at the time the basement was a kitchen and hat shop. Back then, the drinking was done upstairs at the “Beaver and Lac’d Hat.” It’s possible that either Hamilton or Franklin — both of whom spent time in Annapolis, though Hamilton’s visits were far more historically significant than Franklin’s — might have enjoyed a pint there. (The Federal House, winner of the Judges’ Choice award for cream of crab soup at the Capital‘s Crab Soup Cook-Off, is a relative newcomer, having opened in 1830.) Despite the 1747 Pub’s historic pedigree, there appeared to be on one there from the NTo’PF; the septuagenarians must not be a late-night crowd. Maybe they were heeding Benjamin Franklin’s “early to bed” aphorims. Phil and I did not, continuing our pub crawl to West Street’s Rams Head Tavern after our round at the 1747 Pub.
The day belonged to Benjamin Franklin — Lowell’s interpretation of Franklin was the highlight of the festivals. Yet the day seemed the antithesis of Franklin’s aphorisms. For example, Franklin is credited with saying, “Eat to live, and not live to eat” — hardly an apt epigram for the day of the Maryland Seafood Festival. With a little editing, one Franklin observation can be rendered apt for the day. In a 1779 letter to André Morellet, Franklkn wrote, “Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine, a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.” Rain plays a similar same role with barley and hops.
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