When morning came, I dragged myself out of bed to volunteer at a CEP event called "Neighbor to Neighbor", an organized cleanup of a local neighborhood. We were promised breakfast, and were given half a muffin and two donut holes each. Considering that we were about to do 4 hours of physical labor, I was pretty steamed. The volunteers worked on cleaning up trash throughout the Alice Taylor housing project, which I discovered spans from Ruggles Street back into Mission Hill. Boston is very skilled at working housing projects into the local landscape. The details of the cleanup are uninteresting; suffice to say that I came away with an ugly purple t-shirt and a raging hunger. The Delivery Man came over to play Super Smash Bros. with Alaric, Sean and me before Springfest.
Before long, Alaric and I headed to Matthews for Springfest. I was glad that we decided on balcony tickets -- the arena's not extremely large, the view was great, and we had our pick of seats. The Cold War Kids were playing when we arrived, but I wasn't upset for missing part of their performance. If anything, we were better off; the acoustics in Matthews are not wonderful, but more importantly, this band's vocalist sounds like his junk is stuck in a vise. I'm all for rock and roll, but this performance was unimpressive at best. I entertained myself by watching people trying to covertly smoke weed down among the floor seats.
Sara Bareilles was next up, and her performance was excellent, even better than Mixfest two years ago. Alaric and I had moved from the back left of the balcony to a spot a little closer to the stage, and a gaggle of loudly singing girls stood in front of us and blocked the view for much of this set. Finally, the time came for Snoop Dogg. His DJ/hype man/whatever played some tunes to keep us occupied, and we waited. And waited. And finally, after probably forty minutes, the man himself appeared. Sporting a Bruins cardigan and probably blazed out of his mind, Snoop Dogg immediately lit the place up, and I danced for practically all of his set. He performed lots of his old standards, a few tributes to gangsta rappers who went before, and even threw "I Love Rock 'n Roll" into the middle of his set -- it seemed like there was nothing he couldn't use to entertain. The final stroke was a masterful, almost choir-like arena-wide singalong to "Young, Wild and Free". The wait was worth it after all, and I can finally say I went to Springfest.
After the show, several of us trekked up to Mission Hill for a party at the girls' place. At the foot of St. Alphonsus Street, we crossed paths with a large contingent from that same party, and they told us that a cop had just broken it up. We decided to see if we could still go in and calm things down, perhaps provide some reassurance, but a drunk Sabrina insisted on making the call. The subsequent lack of diplomacy meant that we would not be getting in (apparently Lauren B was having some sort of panic attack), so we turned tail and went home. Alaric, Sean and I went to LJL's place to order wings and talk about hockey; none of the girls wanted to party/watch a movie/really do anything, so I got sleepy in short order. After a good dose of lethargy, I went home to not work on what I should have been working on the whole evening.
Quotes of the day:
"I think of people who like EDM as listening to their alarm and putting soda in their cereal." - another volunteer
"Are you going to Congress? To clean the place up?" - a random passerby, messing with us
"I don't know what a Cold War Kid is, but they seem like they're having fun." - someone in the bathroom at Springfest (courtesy of Jane)
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