Festival celebrates S.F.’s strangeness
Goings get weird at street fair honoring art, individuality
Only in San Francisco does a street fair packed with people in various states of dress and undress draw little attention.
The 18th annual How Weird Street Faire — an amalgamation of Burning Man and Coachella but without the dust — shut down several blocks South of Market near Howard and Second streets Sunday. “Experience the fun, feel the magic, be weird!” its tagline exclaimed. And that’s what thousands of people did for the art, costumes and music performances.
As the partygoers streamed over crosswalks and through gridlocked traffic on Mission Street, there was no honking of horns, no jeers and no shouts. It was just another day in a city already known for its weirdness. The thrum of bass echoed down the street, and clouds of marijuana smoke and shimmery bubbles streaked upward into the sky. On one stage, belly dancers in gold brocade outfits undulated in time to the sound of chimes blaring from a row of speakers.
“It’s a little bit crazier than I thought,” said Leighann Hernandez, 20, of Sacramento. She and her friend Kristen Sosa, 20, woke up at 8 a.m. to paint glitter on their faces and drive to San Francisco. Plastic vines with tiny leaves covered Hernandez’s bra and underwear, and she held a wooden stick covered in foliage. Sosa wore fishnet tights and strips of neon green cloth wrapped around her abdomen.
“We changed in the car at a Denny’s on the way here,” Hernandez said. “The waitress stood so far away from us. You could tell she was a little weirded out. But everyone here is great. I just didn’t know there would be nudity. At every turn, it’s like, ‘Oh, there’s another ... you know what.’ ”
One of those men wore a tan bucket hat with a GoPro camera strapped to the brim. A blue
name tag stuck to his bare chest read, “Will pose for photos.” In one iPhone picture, he wrapped an arm around a blonde with corkscrew curls. Their cheeks were flushed red from the sun, and they smiled with all of their teeth.
But he declined to comment, saying, “I don’t like to be too public about these things.”
At one of the nearby music stages, Austin Ohumacht, 20, of Daly City waved his arms to an electronic beat blasting from the stage. He twirled a woman in a red dress and then gyrated against her. Ohumacht said he had just moved from Baltimore.
“I just love these beats,” he said. “This is the greatest gathering. I just moved to San Francisco, and this seems like the most San Francisco thing to do today. I just took a picture with a naked guy. Can you believe that?”
From a nearby secondfloor apartment, two men stuck their heads out a living room window. They drank cans of Miller Lite and bobbed their head to the beat of the music. Next to the building, venders hawked wares such as handpainted heart sunglasses for $35 and fuzzy clip-on pink cat tails for $15.
Shayna Triche, 29, who lives in the Mission District, adjusted her PeptoBismol pink wig and relaxed in the shade. The festival was a hit because you could come early and leave early, she said — perfect for her because she is a schoolteacher with an early bedtime. She wore a pink watermelon dress and blackand-white block tights.
“I don’t like to stay up late,” she said. “Here, it’s OK to be yourself no matter how weird it is. That’s why I moved to San Francisco. Sometimes you can get weird looks out and about, but not here. This is a taste of the best culture. For a day, everything is amazing.”
“I just moved to San Francisco, and this seems like the most San Francisco thing to do today. I just took a picture with a naked guy. Can you believe that?” Austin Ohumacht, of Daly City