Dispatches from the Taste…

Well, it’s still as fat and ugly as it was last year, perhaps even more so. But I can’t help but find this meat chute of a festival a bit endearing if not for the food, beer and free music but for the fabulous people watching. The Taste attracts all kinds.

There was a tall man in his 50s wearing a ten-gallon hat, Hawaiian T-shirt, shorts and full-sized black cowboy boots and not a hint of irony.

There was a man that looked like a fat handicapped version of my best friend back in Omaha.

There was a group of foreigners (British accents) in their early twenties who got swindled for a few bucks from a group of black teenagers peddling silly one-sheet poems that were supposed to benefit their youth basketball team (a frequent scam in Chicago — the “youths” looked to be about my age). I almost hollered to the foreigners not to fall for it, but I didn’t want to cause a fuss with the half dozen hoods that had descended upon them. So I just watched the poor couple confusedly fork over a couple bills thinking they were helping Jemaine’s basketball team get new Nikes. (Jemaine probably got a new pair of Nikes, all right, but it’s doubtful they had anything to do with a youth league basketball team).

(Note to prevent me from being accused of being racist: I used to suspect these guys were actually legit until one day I was riding the Orange Line to Midway next to an older black lady when a couple guys pushing the same poems. “Those damn kids go home with more money in their pockets at the end of the day than I do running that scam,” she groaned to me.

Of course I also feel obligated to talk about the music. On Saturday I had the exquisite pleasure of seeing Kenny Rogers live for the first time in my life. It was underwhelming (I honestly had semi-high hopes for the show — I don’t mind his First Edition material. Of course, that was decades ago). These days the man’s face is so bloated from recent plastic surgery that you can barely recognize him (he looked like someone who was abruptly awoken from a deep sleep, his eyes barely visible above his puffy cheeks). The set hit its low point when the old guy started rapping the Coolio remake of “The Gambler.”

Then there was John Mayer on Wednesday. I didn’t know how to feel looking at the flesh of a man who’d tagged more grade-A celebrity ass than I’ll even see in person. I didn’t know whether to hate the fucking guy because of it or give him props. He doesn’t seem as terrible a guy as his music is: I used to look forward to reading his music column in Esquire.

The set was largely dull. It took a back seat to the fistfight that broke out between a bunch of teenagers behind us and our looking in amazement/cracking jokes at the no-beer-drinking-yet-smoking-hot-blonde bible beaters that were standing next to us. Mayer didn’t play that fucking “Your Body is a Wonderland” song, so it wasn’t that bad.

In fact, to close the show he brought out local legend Buddy Guy and they closed the it with “Sweet Home Chicago,” a song that, under any other circumstances, gets a roll of the eyes from me because it’s so overplayed in this city. But standing with 50,000 other drunk Chicagoans on a perfect summer day with the skyline providing our shade, I must say I got a kick out of it.