Serifs Gone Wild!

Woody Allen’s new film, Midnight in Paris, opened in Spokane last night, so the theme of crashing the party of a past epoch is, well, present in my mind. (The film’s past is a very good-looking past, I must add: Adrian Brody as Salvador Dali! for crying out loud.)

Wilkie knows her place!

The seasoned Thrippie reader will not be shocked that this yellow table tent’s jaunty font caught my eye. 

I’m especially charmed by the attempt to yellow out the official time of the Beer Garden. The little plastic teepee reflects an earlier era, which makes me curious about its past life. What kinds of revelry has this tent seen? Were the Beer Gardens in days of yore so wild that Spokanites were cut off promptly at 8 p.m. and sent home with ibuprofen?

This sign’s imperfection lets us have it both ways. We see the new intention, but we also get a look at its history.

In Part I of “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Freud claims, “Thoughts which are mutually contradictory make no attempt to do away with each other, but persist side by side. They often combine to form condensations, just as though there were no contradiction between them, or arrive at compromises such as our conscious thoughts would never tolerate, but such as are often admitted in our actions.” The stolen table tent is a kind of dream space, a tablet of the unconscious mind where possibilities are open. The Beer Garden is and is not from 5pm-8pm.

Yes, dear reader, I said stolen. It was not Thrippie's finest hour. I and my accomplice, to whom I might or might not be related, swiped it off the table when no one was looking. Maybe next summer I’ll sneak it back into the ArtFest booze corral and return it to its native habitat. 

But for now, ArtFest, I pledge to feed and care for this sign, to love it as though it were my own. It’s a much cooler centerpiece, I might add, than my usual bowl of questionable onions or a stack of papers.

(If anyone from Artfest happens upon this post, I beg of you: leniency! Always leniency).