A Garden Variety Show
Backyard Variety, followed by Storm-Induced Living Room Short Films
Blackwood, NJ
July 4, 2026
Where do history, tradition and possibility collide? Leaving Philly proper behind – in my literal rearview – I drove toward the Ben Franklin Bridge to New Jersey, not only to get out of and away from the city’s July 4 festivities (and the concomitant promise of fireworks and debauchery and highly-probable peak municipal stress and strain) but more importantly to go toward a backyard-pool-party-turned-variety-show, just twelve short miles away, knowing little about what to expect or what I’d see, hear, experience. I thought about my international housemates – from Portugal and Italy and India and Spain, academics here on research grants and big World Cup fans – and hoped they’d have something like a classic experience to write home about doing their own thing, taking in the 250th and somehow getting a rich and true experience of this place, but based on the conversation we had on the porch when I got home, I think I might have stolen their thunder, far from the obvious rituals and iconography of flag decals and cobblestone streets, surrounded instead by art, abundant food, several coolers on a back lawn, a homemade stage, an above-ground pool, sunflowers and a garden path.
I often self-disparagingly call the DIY shows I play “adult talent shows,” and this was sort of like that in the absolute best way: unpretentious, open-hearted, fun and creative and vibrant and colorful, and best of all, the variety! The show didn't put any one kind of talent on a pedestal above others, choosing instead to celebrate the breadth of it all. One couple played some songs where the guitarist’s toddler was on his knee because the kid kept crying for daddy; there were covers galore, including the singer who’s newly sober and adjusting to the changes their voice is undergoing on T, singing a heartfelt and lovely “Lilac Wine” (best known from Nina Simone and Jeff Buckley, but originally a Broadway tune); there was an ad hoc Game Show where my married couple pals tried to prove, blind-tasting-style, that there’s a marked difference between Dasani, Poland Spring, Fiji and Smartwater (she batted .500, not bad). There was – I kid you not – a synchronized swimming performance, soundtracked by the immortal Cranberries. Everyday people cooking up the goods, right there in front of me.
One of my little missions in live-event writing – and in life, which is where the writing comes from anyway – is to find out about things early and to notice how good things are in that budding time. I love going to small shows because a small wonder is no small wonder to me. It feels weird to be overly celebratory or effusively praising something that’s still growing or gestational, to functionally be giving flowers in the press to something that doesn’t quite need to collect press clippings just yet; you want to give things a chance to develop on their own natural path, unbothered. And I’m more interested generally in cheerleading than criticism; I’m less interested in providing a point in a piece than a suggestion of a time, an event, an occurrence. A suggestion is not sharp; it is more like wading in a pool shallowly, feeling something that reminds you of submersion enough that you, the reader, will want to dive in, too. I love the way writing helps you choose what to remember, which helps you, and others, choose what to seek out next. Dave Hickey called it (I’m paraphrasing, hugely) “playing air guitar.”
So: then the performances ended, and what was meant to be an intermission, the sun all the way down now, was filled with the incredible dark swaying of a screen of trees high off that signaled the incoming storm, and the laconic puttering out of the pool to towels and places to change, everyone retrieving their things, boxing up and bringing food and plastic cutlery and containers into the kitchen, mindful not to let the inside cats out, everyone banding together, no one left a passive spectator, all action heaving then settling into the living room to premiere short films while the storm began – films made by participants in the show, about a merman in the Schuylkill ("The Shape of WaWa"), about strange grotesque creatures filling up at gas pumps filled with “Milmk” (“The Future That Liberals Want”), about The Sopranos if all the characters were claymation noses instead ("The Sopranoses") – and the trees and boughs and sunflowers in the front yard heaving in the streetlamp light with rain, water clinging and flowing, the big drink of a big storm and the lush rejuvenation of a heatwave breaking rhythmically before us, smoking and laughing like cinema on the porch, a collective feeling of accomplishment, of a good show, of a great night…
“This should be a tradition,” someone said when the performances ended; maybe it was many someones saying it, in many conversations going on simultaneously and in succession near and beyond me, as the downpour dreamily backdropped the transition from show into party — and I felt a twinge of clairvoyance and timelessness that it already was tradition-bound, already had the weight of something years in the making, already with years left to go. But then again, maybe not. With enough energy and support this show will happen every year for a lifetime, but energies fizzle, life happens fast, and nothing lasts forever. Let’s just say that the first of these Garden Variety Shows is in the rearview, and here's how I’m choosing to remember it; here's hoping for the 251st I can sign up early and show off my air guitar.
