Festival’s fringe benefit: a sea of unfamiliar folks

If you went to The American Folk Festival nearly two weeks ago, you probably noticed that there were, well, a lot of folks hanging around the Bangor waterfront.

I don’t mean the folk musicians and folk artisans. I mean, quite literally, all of the people who visited Bangor the weekend of Aug. 26-28. I mean, the 135,000 folks estimated to have attended.

Who were all those folks, anyway? Where do they come from? And why aren’t they here more often?

Because it was great to see them in town, if only for a weekend.

Who knows whether there were any love connections or at least any dates made. But there were plenty of opportunities. It’s easy to imagine a chance meeting after accidentally bumping into someone on the Kenduskeag Dance Stage during a performance by salsa band Edwin Ortiz y su Orquesta La Romana or ska impresarios the Skatalites.

How about some good-natured commiserating while waiting in line for Indian food? Or pointing someone in the direction of the craft tents?

Sure, many of us locals have come to view the Folk Festival as a kind of end-of-the-summer social event, where we bump into just about everyone we know. To get from one end of the festival to the other is a journey of stops and starts as we meet up with friends and run into acquaintances.

Still, it was a wonderful change of pace to listen to music at the Railroad Stage with the folks whose faces you hadn’t seen a million times around town. And then, after the Folk Festival closed up Friday and Saturday evenings, it was refreshing to head to the local bars and pubs to see yet more new faces. The regulars were out in full force, but there were more people I didn’t recognize out and about.

Where did the guy in line for drinks at the Sea Dog, for example, come from? He was awfully nice, as we sort of flirted about who was going to cut in line in front of whom. We bantered for a few minutes, and then he disappeared into a sea of people. Maybe it was me who disappeared. But I never saw him again.

A friend of mine met two girls. Two! He’d never seen them before and probably won’t again. And one of my partners-in-crime bumped into an old friend who was at the Folk Festival with a friend of his, and we all wound up Saturday evening chatting together on Washington Street.

And here’s the beauty of a place full of thousands of strangers – if your attempts to talk to someone aren’t well-received, chances are you can disappear into the crowd, too.

So where do all of these folks come from and how can we find them?

Here’s my conclusion. These folks are everywhere. I’m the one who doesn’t go anywhere. Weeks before the big stages even went up on the Bangor waterfront these folks were at the Blueberry Festival in Machias, the Lobster Festival in Rockland, the Potato Blossom Festival in Fort Fairfield.

They were at the Bangor State Fair and the Skowhegan Fair; the week after the Folk Festival they were probably at the Blue Hill Fair, too.

Whoever thought that the idea of being around strangers was a good excuse to fill up our summer calendars? New faces are everywhere. You just have to be willing to go out and find them, for folk’s sake.

Jessica Bloch can be reached at jbloch@bangordailynews.net.