Hermosa Beach Goes Weird On Us

Hermosa celebrates Memorial Day and Labor Day with an outdoor market and a food court every year. New at the event are frozen chesecake slices on a stick which are then dipped into milk and white chocolate and handed to the consumer. I think you could duplicate this at home for considerably less than $5 a slice.

I was delighted to find a stall selling Provencal tablecloths and promptly bought the rectangular size I've been needing. Oddly enough, the vendor lady didn't speak French; she was a Brit.

Urgent shopping having been attended to, we repaired to the Poopdeck where we were lucky enough to snag window seats. We'd barely settled in when around the corner came a couple. He was wearing a pair of rust-colored pants and matching shirt; a thick black wig, held off of his forehead with a hippy headband and dark glasses. All we saw of her was: brown brogues, worn with a near floor-length blonde mink coat, blonde hair and a face covered in a pair of big sunglasses with fat, white frames. Daisy and Gatsby, beaming in on a time trip? The Village People stopping in for a quick one before heading to the big stage?

And then, out on the patio, I spotted a black man, easily 6 ft. 5 in. tall, but only about 150 lbs. wearing a one-piece black jumpsuit? Flight suit? open at the neck with a jaunty black and white polka dot ascot! His dark glasses had chrome yellow plastic frames.

Just then a group of three women and one man entered the patio; all of them seemed to be in good moods... the fat lady was jiving to the music -- pendulous breasts swayed; belly fat jiggled as she groover around to Elton John's "Tiny Dancer." She was neither.

Another thing I noticed -- we form lines to board the free buses from a Northrop parking lot to the fair. But both times yesterday, people blithely crashed their way to the bus doors, completely ignoring our polite little squeaks of, "The line is back there" from many of us. They must have been tourists - we're pretty polite down here at the beach. Laid-back, you might even say.