Rain-barrel painters at Thursday’s Live Healthy Harrisburg Health Fair.
Last night, at the playground at 4th and Emerald uptown, a pair of castles appeared.
One was gray and blue, with pointy turrets, masonry and a blonde damsel in a window. The other was red and said “Party.” Pinned to the grass with white straps, like Gulliver, they were rapidly overrun.
To the west, at the foot of the fortresses, sprang up something of a medieval village. Tents stood shoulder-to-shoulder along a path. Drawn together for the Live Healthy Harrisburg Health Fair, Mayor Thompson’s summer wellness initiative, they ran the gamut of fitness, both body and mind.
Penn State had a couple of tables, one of them laden with smoothies. Capital BlueCross was there, as was Capital Area Head Start, Planned Parenthood and PPL. One table had a nutrition wheel. Another was handing out vegetable chips.
At the north end, whitewashed and stacked like siegeworks, were the rain barrels. Brushes and tubes of paint lay nearby. Maureen Maxwell, of the Rain Barrel Coalition, explained how it worked.
“We’re like a flash mob. We send out emails and before you know it, people are involved. Like this man in his eighties!” She indicated a man on a nearby bench. He smiled. “And then they’re part of the flash mob that is Rain Barrel Coalition.”
The barrels, oil drum-sized and made of blue plastic, once held artificial flavoring. Painted, they sell for $50 apiece, as catchments for garden water.
“We go to neighborhoods where kids never have the chance to draw,” Maxwell added. The barrels had been covered in line drawings in advance: rainbows, raindrops, stars, flowers. A young girl holding a slender brush filled in the eyelashes on a smiling sun. “We try to be neat,” she said.
Nearby, with dreads tucked under a bandanna and peel-and-sketch charcoal pencils behind his ear, Courtland, the coalition’s resident artist, painted a dolphin’s nose.
“I’ve worked with Jump Street off and on for years,” he said, nodding towards the table where Jump Street, the capital-area arts nonprofit, had set up speakers. “Painting, and also… mostly painting.”
He stood up and surveyed a neighbor’s work. “Awesome, we got a green turtle!”
At the Jump Street table, two dancers, Xavier Farrow and Markila Johnson, tried to cajole passing kids into busting a move. Markila, in a red blouse, sunglasses and soft-toe shoes, studied ballet; Xavier, in argyle Batman socks and a yellow Batman tee, had no formal training. At the suggestion of the term “self-taught,” however, he quibbled.
“If you want to call it teaching, that’s up to you,” he said. “I let the music move me.”
In a moment, three children had approached them, ushered by adults and looking wary. Xavier stooped and, smiling, started to boogie. Two of the children, small boys, were unmovable, but the eldest began to bounce absently, all knee. She was bluffing. At the drop, she went crazy.
Bob Welsh, who founded Jump Street in 2000, explained that the hip-hop table was just one of the organization’s many public art projects. Xavier, for instance, had spent the afternoon in period costume, during a living-history walk along Bethel Trail, a route commemorating the history of Harrisburg’s African-American communities.
In conjunction with Jump Street, the Harrisburg Police Athletic League had set up a mobile skatepark on the basketball court, where a game was already underway. The players, unperturbed, kept shooting hoops, and soon the scrape of skateboards filled the air.
The sun started setting, slowly. The park remained crowded. A man in red shorts and an ankle monitor walked by, carrying a baby.
Dylan Simon, representing Green Urban Initiative—it was a night of iniatives—announced that on Saturday, August 10, between 10:00 and 2:00, the nearby Atlas Street garden would unveil a mural. “We want to sort of demonstrate the difference between graffiti and street art,” he said.
At the barrels, Courtland considered what to draw on a final, unmarked drum. “The trick is simplifying everything,” he said. “You want something everyone can paint.”
Live Healthy Harrisburg will host its final health fair of the summer at Reservoir Park, on August 15 from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. For more information, call 717-255-3020 or visit Harrisburgrec.com.
