Bridgton was having an outdoor art show on Saturday. We like Bridgton anyway, so it was pretty logical to go. The show was at Shoney Park at the far end of town, sort of right at the outlet of Highland Lake. After about four booths we walked over a pedestrian bridge that crossed the brook coming from the lake, down the other side, and back to the booths on the other side of the side street. We probably got to see all the booths, as well as get a close up look at the brook and dams between the lake and the brook.
I didn’t count all the teeth on the gear wheels that control the spillway of that little dam, but there were three big gear wheels with tiny driving cogs on the inside and driven cogs at maybe four times that diameter, and a big rack-and-pinion at the end to lift the dam gate.
Most of the art was paintings, predominantly landscapes and flowers. There were a couple of photography booths that I liked a lot. The most interesting booth, to me, was Eve Abreu’s rustic furniture. Eve, a small woman about my age, was wearing a very disturbing name tag, a little piece of wood with “Eve” carved in it with the head and a quarter-inch of the shank of a 10-penny nail sticking out of the front. At first glance it looked as though the nametag were nailed into her, until you figured out that the nail was cut off flush with the back of the tag. She shrugs and tells people, “Yeah, it hurts”, or “We’re pretty tough around here.”
Eve is somehow in cahoots with Tim Spotted Wolf, native american flute maker. Tim gave a workshop on making flutes back in February and has another scheduled for October, at Eve’s place in Bridgton around the corner from where the art show was. I have a flute kit that I bought at Fort Hall last summer at the powwow. Chances are I should do one of the workshops. But can I get up early enough on a Saturday morning to be in Bridgton at 8?