A huge part of a tremendous weekend was the Commercial Drive Car-Free Day.  Anybody who’s been to Commercial knows that it should be basically car free anyway, and almost is what with the random peeps running out into traffic here and there.  So yesterday from 1st to Venables it was formally, and it was fantastic…

This was '07 but still amazing

props to Dustin “Quasar” Sacks for the Flickr pic

…all the local vendors and foodies come out and have impromptu street patios with impossibly well-priced specials on everything you might like:  Portuguese chicken, wild salmon, buckets of beer, pomegranate mojitos, prawn souvlaki, samosas.  Performance art.  Organic bamboo bedding.  Curries, slices of pizza, vodka tonics, used clothing.  Last pair shoe sales.  Lesbian collectives.  Natural fibres, bead curtains, freestyle rappers, Vietnamese spring rolls, falafel.  Protests against the Olympics.  The first legitimately young Young Communist Party booth I’ve ever seen.  A Yugo with plastic flowers glue gunned all over it.  The Healing Garden with everything from cushions and Tantric Healing [!!!] to sinus massage and a toning circle.  Chicken wings, Greek salad, bratwurst, cappucino, imported fair-trade shea butter.  Argentinian pan-flute music.  Chardonnay, home-made greeting cards, hemp pants, and a breast-feeding rest-station.

I recently re-read Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin:  the protagonist, an almost 90-year-old woman, describes the difference between the Toronto of her youth as a “Protestant city”  and the new Toronto [I'm pretty sure this was when I was in university] as a “medieval city”…half anticipating lepers in chains, and I always imagine Ren Faire foolz in jester hats at that point.  But for real, the Car Free Day is that:  a jostling crush of medieval bodies, interested in what we are all interested in:  food, music, massages, perhaps booze [I'm not saying, I'm just saying], togetherness, HUMAN NESS.

It was delightful, not least because of my lunch and seeing my friend Julie’s amazing clothes.  Srsly you have to check these clothes out.  Any line that describes their hoodies as “Faramir” is worth its weight in Elvish rope.

1 Comment »

June 19th, 2009 Sylvia Says:

I want these pants: http://www.mahadevidesign.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=11&products_id=104&zenid=2pv22lavbduq7kmobdn4u9ore3

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