East of Boston

 A good time was had by all at the 2008 Onset Cape Verdean Festival.

Out of the whole famn damily, only Gabrielle was there for anything cultural. The rest of us were there to chow... and chow we did.

I had this chicken, which was as good as any fried chicken I've had above the Mason/Dixie line. The chef wouldn't share his batter recipe with me, even when I whispered all conspirationally in my broken Creole. 

Fans of the Colonel will be amused to know that he shoveled in 3 orders of something called Jack Chicken, 2 giant Linguica sandwiches, something called "munchupa" which I didn't see, a few pizza slices, half of his own daughter's fried dough, and like 5 cokes. It was about as many calories as I- at 100 pounds or so- consume in a week. 

 Not a lot of people know this, but Batman is Cape Verdean. It sort of explains the trunks.

I was there at like noon, so it was relatively white-friendly. More than one person told me that it gets a bit rowdier later in the afternoon. "You should come here at 5 or so," said festival veteran Stunning Steve. "It's like Heart Of Darkness."

Cape Verde, or the Portagee Cap Vert, is an archipelago off the coast of western Africa. The islands were uninhabited when the Portuguese discovered them in 1460. They were a major hub in trans-Atlantic trade. Cape Verde became independent of Portugal in 1975.

 They supplied immigrants to America in great numbers about the time when Whaling started to catch on, and today hold prominent portions of the population in Dorchester, Brockton, Providence, and, of course, the Fall River/New Bedford area. Onset has enough Cape Verdeans to have their own festival. The USA has 265,000 people of Cape Verdean descent. If there's enough food, even the Colonel gets a little Cape Verdean.

The Staties had a cool exhibit. That hunk of car is hooked up to some hydraulic thing, and it is then rolled over and over in one of those bad-driving-displays that are supposed to scare kids... who, instead, are more likely to shout "Sweet!"

 My best line of the day.... we were asking the staties when the demonstration started.

"Is it like a ride? Can we go on it?" I asked.

"No. It simulates a violent car accident. You'd most likely get thrown from the vehicle. We only use dummies, and the dummies haven't got here yet."

At that point, my husband came up... covered in powdered sugar as he tried to stuff an entire piece of fried dough into his mouth.

"You can begin now," I said.