All things considered, I’d rather be in 7-Eleven.
No really, the new Bay Street Theater plans, sleek and lofty though they may be, had me wondering where the rabble will go. Because no amount of gentrification can get rid of them all, right? Won’t they, we, simply pop up elsewhere — maybe Riverhead? — looking for cheap crap? That brick of ramen, the generic aspirin shook down the gullet like M&Ms. Gum by the fistful, the quart of can’t-live-without-it half-and-half. Rubbers.
That too-goddamned-convenient convenience store, now on the chopping block, is never wanting for customers, no matter the hour, season, weather, economic calamity, natural disaster, or umpteenth downtown Sag Harbor fire.
And the coffee from those banks of nozzle-dispensing warmers isn’t even half bad; in fact, it’s better than the more expensive stuff down the street. How many times have you seen dragging worker bees just off a shift pulling on 16 or 20-ounce paper cups of caffeine as they exit the glass doors in anticipation of the long drive home, and you know as well as I do that any drive on the Island will be the soul-suckingest there is, heavily trafficked, an endless crawl followed by an explosion of excess speeds and zero of interest to look at.
A lowbrow retailer begets trashy purchases, and so I ask, where else will a bag of Cheetos prompt a father to regale his children with tales of the “cheese breeze” drifting from the smokestacks of the Frito-Lay plant across Wisconsin’s Rock River onto the Beloit College campus, the aftereffects of the all-American production of that tar-sticky but irresistible orange coating.
Regarding the kids of Sag Harbor, it bears repeating, if only because the loss becomes more pronounced as it recedes — the hangout and after-school stop-in spot that was the Conca D’Oro pizza parlor is an object lesson in how once a refuge like that is let go, forget it, there’s no getting it or anything similar back.
Meanwhile, with all due respect, there are an awful lot of arts centers from East Hampton to Southampton.
There once was a curious subset of the population, some might say creepy but I would submit likable, a keep-to-himself sort: the Long Island dirtbag. The greasy-haired dude eating peanut butter sandwiches up in his room while spinning records and reading Lester Bangs. He seems to have metamorphosed into the video gamer, maybe the online gambling addict. In John Waters’s “Cecil B. Demented,” the fugitive director-hero-criminal, fleeing through the Baltimore streets, ducks into a darkened movie theater. “Action fans!” he shouts. “Help us!” So, yeah, them too: action fans. 7-Eleven frequenters.
In other words, here comes the new theater and the moneyed crowd that always gets what it wants. But what about the misfits?