Perhaps

Photograph by Joan Kalyan-Curtis

That's a fire-dancer from The River City Burners in the foreground and the Anthony Curtis Band in the background. You can't see it it the pic, but there was also this huge searchlight overhead, sweeping the clouds all night. It was quite the spectacle.

I didn't know that there were firedancers on the bill- when I got to the space I saw a group of men and women wearing what looked like low-key black rubber fetish gear and doing these rhythmic , swinging exercises with what I thought were some sort of padded nun-chukkas- I had never seen firedancers warming up before.
There were parents with kids and balloons and some musical performance by local kids...some things that struck me::

- A teen-age black kid got on the stage with a guitar. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that the first thing I noticed was that he was wearing the 'uniform' of a local crack-gang, something I think was coincidence , as it consists a stocking cap, a mumu-size white t-shirt and pants so large they must be designed to be worn around the ankles; all standard fare for kids here, black and white.
If I was dealing drugs on the street, I'd want pants that didn't fall down when I had to run from cops.
But I am shamefully stereotyping- he wasn't a gangbanger.
He played guitar; the kid was obviously a beginner, but he'd been practicing and was able to to play some nice sounding classical excercises. He was really shy and seemed surprised by his own ability to make beautiful sounds.
I think if more kids were given a chance to make a beautiful sound, then perhaps they wouldn't be so likely to fall into the hopeless, angry and often violent pit of despair that is the urban America ghetto. Maybe they'd see some hope and find something good and wonderful in themselves- because there is no other place for them to find it in the ghetto. Maybe they can use that self-love to get out.
Perhaps I'm hopelessly naive in this thought.

- It didn't strike me as the least bit odd to me that there would be a group of (seeming) mild S&M enthusiasts mingling with a small crowd of adults and children , black and white alike.
Maybe it's because I've had step-families ranging from southern black Baptists to Yankee Jews, perhaps it's the four days I spent , lost in a vast New Orleans dungeon...I dunno. It just seemed normal to me, the dancers and kids, BBQ and balloons ... why wouldn't it?
I'd like to tell myself that I'm this remarkably open-minded and tolerant person, and that I don't think of people in terms of color and sexual orientation, but I think the reality is that I'm so jaded that almost nothing surprises me anymore and my indifference to race and sexuality is just part of my overall indifference to many things that most people consider important.
Perhaps I'm hopelessly cynical in this thought.