Confined to my house for the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of places. Real, physical places. Places I’d never given much thought to — they were simply a location, a point on the map — until the Covid-19 regulations swept through and gave them much more weight. Now, they’re places full of memories, where we used to come together, to talk, to laugh, to interact, to hug, to make memories that we now desperately hold onto.
Sure, we’ve found ways to do things together over Zoom, but these virtual events lack all of the sights and smells and strangers and serendipity, so they just don’t cut it. When I think of places I miss most — environments I felt most alive in — I think about festivals.
Mass gatherings of community are one thing we really haven’t been able to have or re-create over the past year.
In my old life, I took advantage of the Bay Area’s large amount and variety of festivals. Be it massive ones people from all over the country travel here for, like Pride, Outside Lands, or the Folsom Street Fair; or the ones most loved by locals, like Hardly Strictly, the Castro Street Fair, or the Chinese New Year Parade; or the more obscure, like the Gilroy Garlic Festival or the Berkeley Kite Festival. It felt like no matter the weekend, there was some live gathering happening in celebration of something.
I have an emotional attachment to every place in the Bay that’s held a festival that I’ve been to, one that’s innately intertwined with the memories and experiences created there. Live events as a business have suffered perhaps the most during the pandemic — mass gatherings of community are one thing we really haven’t been able to have or re-create over the past year.
Sign up for The Bold Italic newsletter to get the best of the Bay Area in your inbox every week.
Memories of when these were possible have carried me through this past year.
Like my first Bay Area festival, Sketchfest, back in January 2017, where I took a selfie of my three friends and me that later became my very first Facebook cover photo. I oversaturated it so it would look as vibrant as it feels in my head.
Like running all over San Jose and San Francisco for Cinequest and the San Francisco International Film Festival, puttering from theater to theater on a cinematic scavenger hunt. Permanently burned into my mind is the lingering taste of green curry and the cold damp on my clothes after a friend and I took shelter from the rain in a cozy Thai restaurant in between films.
Like the San Francisco International Tea Festival, where the fragrant scent of tea leaves filled my whole body. Connoisseurs shuffled between tea variants I’d never even heard of as I tried pu-erh and matcha, bought two boxes of Harney & Sons tea, and tried the ginger beer and kombucha.
One of my most guilty-pleasure festival experiences was at the Great Mac ’n Cheese Melt-Off, where I gleefully stuffed my face with endless mac and cheese combos in a parking lot lovingly converted into the SoMa StrEat Food Park. Food trucks and hungry crowds had converged on this scrap of asphalt.
And then there are memories of big festivals like Outside Lands, but the experiences are just as personal. While the music is the heart of the festival, I’ll never forget the joyful clinking together of biodegradable cups during a picnic in the grass at Golden Gate Park. I’d swoon, jam, and raise a glass to Beck all over the course of a night show and then later see comedians like Chelsea Peretti spitting absurdist comedy and get entranced by Bill Nye grilling the heck out of a steak onstage.
My takeaway: There’s nothing like being surrounded by other people, making a memory of a place — all together, taking in every sense, experiencing life in that moment.
The pandemic brought this all to an end, taking the shape in virtual rooms that sucked the life out of us rather than infusing us with it. I miss the experiences, the seeing and doing of things. But the past year has given me more appreciation for the small moments, not just the big ones, like walking down a quiet street with the sun warming your face. As I’ve navigated this year, I’ve held onto the wild and wonderful memories made up of sensory experiences and shared energy of the past.
I can’t want to make more soon.
