Grumpa Joe's Place

There is nothing like a garden to get my juices flowing. During the past few weeks I have ignored my blog because of extenuating circumstances. Many of you know that I belong to a Lions Club, and two weeks ago Lions International celebrated their 100th birthday with a convention in Chicago. At the last-minute I decided to help out at the parade. I reported on it in a post I titled Amazing Movement. That was my last blog piece. Coincident to the convention I was elected President of the Frankfort Lions Club. I worked the Lions Convention Parade of Nations as President Elect because I hadn’t been sworn in yet. Even though I was not officially the president, the responsibility fell upon me like a ton of bricks.

On June 15, three days after being elected, I learned that the venue we use for our annual fund-raiser called Wurst Fest had closed its doors. For the past thirty-seven years Wurst Fest has been the opening event of the Frankfort Fall Fest which is one of the top ten craft fairs in the country.  This year our Wurst is on Thursday, August 31.

For twenty years, the craft fair has had a Beer and Entertainment Tent operated by a group called BETA (Beer Entertainment Tent Association). The BETA group fell apart and disbanded leaving the craft fair, and the Lions holding the bag. The craft fair is run by the Frankfort Chamber of Commerce. BETA consisted of seven community groups like girls softball, Knights of Columbus, Lincoln Way Band Boosters, etc. The profits from the Beer tent were used to pay volunteers who worked the tent. Usually, these volunteers donated their earnings to their home organization. The Lions tagged on to the Beer Tent by renting it for one night during the Fall Festival. The Chamber craft fair was now facing a huge empty open space in the middle of their event.

The whole thing is complicated by the fact that the beer tent occupies a Village owned parking lot. So now the Village also had a problem. The whole mess could have been resolved had the Chamber agreed to manage the beer tent, and pay the volunteers as before. Nothing would have changed except the people who were managing. I would have made it even more simple by hiring the previous manager to continue operating the beer tent. That is not how the event will run this year. Government got deeply involved. Our Mayor has been waiting for the moment when a disaster like this one came. How did Rahm Emanuel President Obama’s Chief of Staff say it when Obama had a catastrophic problem? “Never let a good catastrophe go to waste.”

The Village Events Commission voted to suspend the BETA group license to use the parking lot. The Mayor rightfully declared that here was not time enough to be fair to all the bars in town to have the option to run the event, so he recommended that the Chamber of Commerce be given the responsibility since they are made up of all the businesses in town. Then came the codicil.

It is no secret that our mayor has been working diligently to raise the reputation of Frankfort to the level of a north shore community like Libertyville, or Kenilworth. He is succeeding at keeping the property values around town increasing, His reputation is sterling and that is why he has been mayor for sixteen years, and recently won another election with seventy-five percent of the vote. He sees the town as the jewel of the south side, and having a raucous beer tent in the middle of a world-class craft fair doesn’t fit his vision. He talked the Chamber into to running the event with the provision they implement his vision which he handed to them in writing along with a layout of the venue.

The Lions have worked diligently over the past years to design an event which would resemble October Fest in Germany. The community has a rich German heritage, and that idea gelled. Suddenly, it has been turned into a small high-class, open air beer and wine garden serving craft beers, and high-end wines with soft snoozy music making it the equivalent of a piano bar.

How does all this fit into the garden? After experiencing three weeks of anxiety over our fund-raiser diving into obscurity I took it out on the weeds. The Monet Vision theme this year is Aztec Blast. It needed refreshing because so many new plants decided to migrate into this elegant world. None of these migrants knew the rules and decided to grow in places where they did not fit. They were not asked to come, they just did. Once established they insisted on propagating and expanding their numbers throughout the boundaries of the Monet Vision. There was only one thing for me to do to save the Vision. I attacked by uprooting them and placing them into a walled space from which they could not escape. This deportation process took three hours of rigorous physical work. The problem is that in many cases I could not get the roots of the problem, and I will have to repeat this process again, and again until the first freeze in October. Or, I could allow these unwanted creatures to assimilate into the masses of the Aztec Blast. Wrong, I can not allow that to happen, these creatures do not obey the rules, they do as nature has designed them to do. Even though they are natives to the earth, they are unfit to live within the boundaries of my garden. Perhaps one day, the Monet Vision will become  Native Beauty in which the canvas will contain only native-born plants without any rules. The problem with that idea is that even among natives there will be a slow process by which the strongest, toughest, and meanest ones will thrive and take over the world.

With all of this said I now introduce you to the 2017 Monet Vision-Aztec Blast.

Filed under: Uncategorized |