July 4th is the time when friends and family get together to celebrate, party, revel,     carouse, make merry, whoop it up, and let one’s hair down.  I thought I knew all about having a good time, but then I encountered a Telluride outfitter’s newspaper ad which read, “Friends don’t let friends festivize unprepared.” Apparently, “festivize” is the verb form of what festivizers do while attending a festival if they are feeling especially festive. I was amused.

Fortunately, on the weekend in question, I did not have to pay for the patience to     deal with Telluride traffic while it hosted the 40th Bluegrass Festival. I did a three-quarter loop on the newly installed roundabout where Highway 145 spins off toward Placerville, and I was free.

It’s not that I’m not a Bluegrass listener. I just don’t crowdize well. Large gatherings inhibit my relaxation gene. I even avoid downloading live recordings, because they make me a little edgy. The attendance at the Bluegrass festival had been capped at 10,000 ticket-holders in a town that registers only 2,500 permanent residents, so I had to salute the professionalism of the police and security personnel, the organizers, and sympathizers. Still, if  I lived there I’d be vacating my home and pitching a tent on Lizard Head Pass for the weekend, trying to adjust my attitude with a little more altitude.

Where I grew up, a festival amounted to a low-key cultural celebration, often focused on some traditional food item, combined with an excessive amount of drinking. “Kolacky Days” is one of the most memorable, and not because I crave those little lumps of dough with a smidgen of fruit in the middle. People from all the neighboring towns show up, party all night, and by morning the main street is transformed into a curb-to-curb bin of beer cans.  Most of the dough that is made is eaten.

Smelting is another annual event I can’t erase from my brain. I’m not sure it qualifies as a festival, or even a sport, but it happens annually, in the spring, when people wade into the cold northern Minnesota streams in the middle of the night with flashlights, buckets and nets in order to scoop hundreds of tiny spawning silver fish from the water. The men who took me smelting usually dipped their catch in batter before frying it, then ate them whole – fins, scales, and all – while swallowing a copious supply of beer. In my opinion, the smelt earned the homonymic name.

Compared to my seminal festival experiences, the Telluride Bluegrass Festival must be a model of sophistication. I don’t know, I’ve never attended. Still, it makes me wonder why advertisers are allowed – perhaps even encouraged – to use words like “festivize” in print without being held accountable? Do individuals who pay through the nose for the chance to see live performances of their favorite celebrities care if their appreciation is reduced to an awkward verb-ish word that lacks any inference of grace?

And it’s not as if Telluride doesn’t host more than a few festivals. If any town deserved recognition for sheer tenacity and organization, Telluride ought to be formally cited as the “City of Festivals,” not the “City of Festivizers.” In addition to the Bluegrass Festival, the schedule includes the Blues and Brews Festival, the KOTO Ride Festival, Plein Air, the Fireman’s 4th of July Celebration, the Playwright’s Festival, Musicfest (not to be confused with the Americana Music Fest or the Chamber Music Fest or the Jazz Festival), the Mountain Film Festival (not to be confused with the Telluride Film Festival), the Cajun Festival, the Festival of the Arts, the Balloon Festival, the Yoga Festival, the Wine Festival, the Mushroom Festival, the Barbecue Festival, the Wild West Fest, the Heritage Fest, the Compassion Festival, the Comedy Festival, and the really, I’m-Not-Making-This-List-Up Festival.

If I were one of the 2,500 residents calling Telluride my home, I’d be writing a longish letter to the editor, asking for a weekend off.  I’d be organizing a political action group – MAFF (Mothers Against Festivizing Festivizers), in order to reduce the number of late-night festalities caused by friends who actually do allow their friends to festivize unprepared.  I’d be communing with the founding fathers, wondering if we couldn’t consider going back to the noisy mining operations that extracted money directly from the earth instead of from the Möbius strip pockets of festival ticket-holders.  I’d be asking, what does it take to make a small town behave like a small town?

I know, I don’t live there, I couldn’t possibly understand, which is why I decided to wordize this proposal for a Festival of Curmudgeons, in case someone who festivizes less than the Telluride crowd knows what I’m talking about.

– David Feela