Hipster Bakers Got Game

We still have not reconciled ourselves to the idea that Lexi and Jenny are moving to Oakland next month. We considered boycotting the first of their three good-bye parties in the hopes that denying this unfortunate reality would make it go away. But in the end we decided that faux-hawks were a better way to register our dissent. Ioan (who has somehow been persuaded to stand still for pretty much anything as long as you tell him it's what meerkats do) went first.


Simon insisted (quite correctly, we think) that sunglasses were a necessary accompaniment to this particular 'do. The rest of us decided we couldn't carry it off with anything like as much panache as these two rebels.

We arrived at the party to discover that Lauren (still celebrating her 31st birthday) had invited the entire staff of the local bakery, and that they had brought heaps of bread and pastries, including apricot danishes that sent several of us straight to heaven. It was a little odd encountering these delightful people out of context, but their shop talk was most enlightening, and the kids enjoyed their attempts at kung fu as the evening wore on.

But the highlight of the party (for us, anyway) was definitely the kickball game. We had to squeeze past the plywood fence to get into the schoolyard, which has been boarded up -- laughably, we might add -- while the School District spends Lord knows how much money moving a line of chain link fence two feet west. (Don't get us started.) Fortunately, as our regular readers are aware, we are not a people easily thwarted by a hunk of plywood wedged in a gate. Nor, it turns out, were the bakers.




In retrospect it's hard to think of any other circumstance or activity that could have brought together meerkat faux-hawks, departing jockful aunts, stunning-but-inappropriately-shod birthday girls, tipsy hipster bakers, and the home-run-happy Mead Street kickball demons. It might have all been a mid-summer night's dream, but for the irrefutable evidence presented the next morning by Ioan's outstanding bedhead.