...was nothing like the Katy Perry song. Sorry to disappoint.
Last Friday night I drove down to Gilroy. For those of you just joining me, Gilroy is home. Home as in "where I come from" home. I lived there from age one-and-a-half or thereabouts until--legally, at least--2010, a year after I finished my Master's degree. I spent my entire childhood there, and it will always be home.
Anyway, I made the drive down. My BFF-since-we-were-three (BFFSWWT) is now an art teacher at our high school.* There was an exhibit of the students' art at a venue downtown, at the 6th Street Studios and Art Center, which is something that has cropped up since I moved away. In fact, the whole downtown area has been revamped in the years I've been gone. When I started the fourth grade, my mother's music lesson clientele had outgrown our living room, and she moved the whole operation downtown. I started spending a great deal of time there. My mental map of the area is still eerily accurate.
At that time, the mid-nineties, downtown Gilroy existed under a sort of grimy film of neglect. That's not to say that it was a ghost town, far from it. There were plenty of businesses. It just had this...sort of dusty-layer feeling to it. That's all but gone now. There's still the odd corner of it--a storefront that hasn't been updated, the backs of some of the buildings as you go down the allies. It's still there if you know where to look. The thing about downtown in the mid-nineties was that nobody really went there unless they had to. These days, they go there because there's actually something happening. Not that there weren't plenty of "boost the profile of downtown, get people down there spending time and money" initiatives through the years, but most of them fell fairly flat. I think the thing that came closest to working was when they would close down Fifth Street for live music one night a week in the summer, but even that wasn't as much of a draw as it could have been. Now, though, there's outdoor dining and boutiques and a wine bar and a couple of clubs (newer ones--the old one, Rio Nilo, is somehow still there) and they've given the whole run of blocks between Fourth and Sixth Street on Monterey Street a facelift. It's a bit twee, if you ask me, but it seems to be working.
BFFSWWT and I spent a great deal of our evening after viewing the art display playing "Hey, wasn't that store over there before?" and "This building used to be ___", and "When did we turn into fucking Los Altos? Our community has agrarian roots, you jerk-offs!"
We had dinner at a taqueria that has been around since I was in middle school.
We got treats at the panaderia that's now in the storefront where there has and hasn't and has again been a panaderia as long as I can remember.
We took a gander at the two buildings my mom's music school occupied during her years on Monterey Street, before she finished out her tenure as director in the building at the back of the Methodist church. We differentiate the two Monterey Street locations by carpet color. The first place is the 'red carpet place', which was next to the Gaslighter, a club/performance venue where quite a few bands got their start. The address there was 7432. The second place is the 'blue carpet place', directly across the street from the red carpet place at 7423. The numbers always amused me. The red carpet place now has a sign painted on the front window that says, "Viva Con Nutricion", which I'm assuming is a vitamin shop of some sort. The blue carpet place is now the wine bar. It was a cigar store for many years, but it had been vacant and then turned into a piano showroom, of all things, when my mom moved in. The owner still displayed pianos, but Mom had the run of the place. It was a really neat building. It still had the original, high, pressed tin ceiling. The front room had a humidor built into the wall--it was a thing to behold. Enormous. So many cupboards and drawers! The wine bar knocked out the front room and has a covered patio there now. They kept the decorative glass above the doorway, though.
It was all a bit surreal, really. Not bad surreal, just...surreal.
And then, once we had walked around and grumbled about change, BFFSWWT and I went and sat in my car so she could decorate my Boot of Shame, which I now have to wear because remember a couple of weeks ago when I tripped over my stepladder in the dark? Yeah. Severe soft tissue trauma in my left foot. Whoops. Honestly, that was the best, most enjoyable, and very much most us part of the evening. Two thirty-something women who have been friends for the majority of those thirty-something years playing with Posca pens in a parked car and being generally ridiculous. It's what we do best.
But at least my Boot of Shame is cute!
*When we were in high school, Gilroy only had one high school. There
are two now. They built the second one on a flood plane. City planners
are really dumb sometimes.
