Exploiting The Rich: Let The Music Play

Spring has finally gotten all sprungly.

I know this to be true because Manager Dad has officially flipped the Cool Weather/Warm Weather switch on his wardrobe, moving from the daily uniform of khaki pants and button-down dress shirts to khaki pants and short-sleeved polo shirts. It’s a whole new wardrobe management ballgame.

Aside from being a symbolic milestone, the switch has the practical effect of shifting five units per week from our local dry cleaner to our home-based Laundry Mountain. This adds up to approximately four extra loads over the course of the summer. While I don’t enjoy the additional labor, this does save about $50 a month on dry cleaning, leaving me all the more to indulge in my fondness for smokes, booze, and cheap hookers.

So while we were talking about saving money, I wanted to share another way I’ve found to entertain your family by taking advantage of the sweat labor of rich folk. (My first post, about the charms of Old Greenwich, can be enjoyed if you have a few extra moments in the bathroom by clicking here.)

The magical land of which I speak today is New Canaan, Connecticut (estimated median home value=$2,000,000). A town which is clearly not afraid to embrace the letter "a," New Canaan has a lively downtown business district filled with stores selling things we can’t afford to buy and restaurants we don’t want to remortgage our homes to eat in.

It’s also one of those metaphor towns that instantly evokes a social stereotype. You know what I mean: Detroit = "Disenfranchised Autoworkers." San Francisco = "Pot-smoking hippies." Long Island = "Joey Buttafuoco". For New Canaan, it’s “Self-Loathing Yuppies,” thanks to the only two major movies inspired by and filmed in the area: The Ice Storm and the Stepford Wives remake, starring Nicole “My Pants Are On Fire When I Claim Not To Have Had Cosmetic Procedures” Kidman. Because I’ve seen her in person, and I promise you, that woman has a Botox technician on speed dial.

But back to my point, which is that aside from an abundance of overindulged, plastic, self-pitying suburbanites (note to friends: not YOU, of course, Brooke, Lawrence, Mel, and Tom – I know you guys are still keepin’ it real), New Canaan also has Waveny Park. Waveny is a beautiful, spacious public area with a lovely old mansion. In the summer (starting on June 11th), they hold free concerts on Wednesday nights on the back porch of the house.

While they are technically for residents only, it is easy for unethical non-resident area freeloaders such as myself to horn in on the fun.

The acts are all has-beens (or more accurately, never-wases) and the music itself ranges from forgettable to puzzling. This year’s kickoff band, “The Bob Button Orchestra” bills itself as playing Big Band classics. I can’t confirm or deny this, but my main take-aways from last year’s show were this:

1) the average age of the band members is approximately 72

next) they like to dress like pirates, complete with puffy shirts and red satin sashes
and

c) despite their advanced age (or perhaps because of it) they like to swill Captain Morgans straight from the bottle between songs (possibly explaining the pirate getups).

It’s become a much-anticipated Wednesday summer family tradition for us. We get the kids, pick up a pizza, and relax with friends while enjoying the fresh air and the “music”. After dinner, the kids run around in the field, doing their best to contract Lyme disease by breaking the Guiness Book’s “Most Ticks Acquired Within a 1-Hour Span” world record.

The evening concludes with a visit to Waveny Mansion’s public toilets, (spotless, mind you, featuring abundant toilet paper, soap, AND hand lotion), where I pick off as many of the ticks that I can, bag them up to send to the state testing lab at $25 a pop, and stuff them into their pajamas so we can execute a swift bedtime once we get home.

The one downside of these concerts, aside from the fear of having our car towed, is an uncomfortably surreal feeling caused by looking around at your fellow concertgoers. They all look like they stepped directly out of a Tommy Hilfinger print ad. And the hordes of roving kids evokes a sort of reverse Children of the Corn, except instead of being filthy and creepily homicidal, they're all preternaturally well-mannered with blonde bowl haircuts and slight French accents, picked up from various summer au pairs.

But if you can suspend your class discomfort, come join us on any given Wednesday. We’ll be easy to spot: amidst a sea of natural-wood camp tables, fashionable umbrellas, carefully packed wicker picnic baskets, and Lilly Pulitzer cricket sweaters, you’ll find a tiny oasis anchored by an ancient, stained Mexican blanket, surrounded with a loud plastic cooler and cheap camp chairs with huge corporate logos (free from various work giveaways).

We’ll save you a slice of pizza, and I’ll even ask Bob to pour you a shot of Captain Morgan’s.

You can access the 2008 Waveny Park concert schedule by clicking here.