September 1, 2010
If you live in the southern part of Brooklyn you probably know the 18th Avenue Feast. Every year the neighborhood gathers together to celebrate Santa Rosalia and buy bootleg CD’s.
I’ve been there too many times to mention and it has gotten a bit boring. Same dunk the clown booth year after year, same bad music by “local artists” who never heard of Bensonhurst, same 14 year old girls trying to look like Snooki. But this year was different.
This year, some true “local artists” had set up a booth to meet their fans.
I’m not referring to The Hong Kong Master Tailor or The ROTNAC, I mean the true local artists, the hard-working heroes, those Spike Television sensations, yes! The Scrappers.
The Scrappers had set up a tent right in the middle of the feast. And like you would expect, it looked like crap. It was a double-wide dirty white tent with the sides rolled up. I’m sure they salvaged it from some carnival they were scrapping. The only sign to tell you what was in it was a small, loose-leaf paper-sized sign spray painted with “Scrappers at the 18th Avenue Feast!”
In front of the tent was a long folding table filled with piles of cheap t-shirts. Cheap as in quality, not price. I don’t know how much they were because they had no signs anywhere and I was not about to ask.
So why didn’t I ask? You’d expect me to have something to say to these guys, right? Well wrong, not these guys. Despite a small portable DVD on the corner of the table showing the last episode of Scrappers, these guys were not the Scrappers. Oh, I’m sure they were some scrappers, little “s,” but not the Scrappers, big “S.” They must have sold some old gas pipes or something at one time, but these guys never had a TV show. They looked a whole lot more like the guys the Rolling Stones hired for security at Altamont. They were milling around, scowling, and punching each other. If these guys decided to call themselves Scrappers and sell some shirts, I sure as hell wasn’t going to stop them. But I was sure that if I asked how much the shirts cost A- I would be forced to buy one and B- my wallet would be a whole lot lighter. (“Hey, what do you mean $20 is too expensive? Now you’re buying two for $50.”)
For all the world, it looked like some random goombas decided to throw together a tent and sell rip-off t-shirts.
To be fair, despite there being seven guys who were totally not Scrappers, there was actually one real Scrapper there. While everyone else was walking around and swearing, eating slices of pizza, showing off bad tattoos, and generally being obnoxious, Frank Noots himself was sitting in the center of the tent drinking one beer while a guy handed him another. Staring off into space, he looked almost, but not quite, totally wasted. Too bad that wasn’t really a Picasso he found on the show this week.
One would almost swear that the roadie-looking thugs had kidnapped and drugged him just so they could claim they were a real Scrapper booth. (“One” would, but not me, because those guys looked dangerous.)
Nowhere was the Spike TV logo anywhere present, nor a single Spike camera, not even a Dino or Mimmo, lucky for them. I hope that means there won’t be a season two. That way Dino and Mimmo can go back to kidnapping old women. (Missed this week’s show? Shame on you.)
A little perspective:
On the next block, WCBS had set up a tent half the size of the Scrappers and people were lined up six deep to get “Brooklyn’s Own” Joe Causi’s autograph. (And yes, one of them was me.) Not far the other way, Lucy’s Sausage had customers lined up six deep for a sweet sausage and peppers. (And yes, one of them was me.) By contrast, the Scrappers booth had no one in front of it. A few people stood a good twelve feet away and wondered if the scrappers were going to attack them if they crossed the neutral zone. (And yes, one of them was me.)
They had what looked like hundreds of t-shirts on the table and I’d be willing to bet they didn’t sell more than a dozen. Even the people in the booth weren’t wearing them.
They’d have done much better with a bootleg CD.
And I have great ideas for T-shirts.
Other products too.
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