Chamblee54

PG needs a good excuse to go to town these days. Outwrite Books hosted a reading from The Fire in Moonlight: Stories from the Radical Faeries: 1975-2010, which qualifies as a good excuse. The first step was to leave Chamblee early, and hope to get a parking spot. The traffic did not cooperate.
Driving down Peachtree was another exercise in patience. PG turned left onto Sixth, and was surprised to see that the Armory building was still standing. It was assumed that the entire block was part of the high rise holocaust, that  conquered the tight squeeze district. PG proceeded eastward towards Piedmont, arrived at Tenth street, and found a parking spot. It was seven p.m., and the reading did not start for a half hour. It was time to walk around and take pictures.
The first stop was 939 Piedmont. PG’s mother lived there, and the building still stands. Piedmont was full of photo opportunities, until Sixth Street was reached. There was a man walking two dogs, one of whom posed cheerfully. The other dog barked at the camera, and was duly ignored.
At Sixth and Juniper, PG looked over the remains of the Armory. Beside the building was a wooden fence. Behind that fence was the parking lot for Backstreet, in all it’s asphalt glory. If those yellow stripes could talk, the stories they could tell. PG choked up a bit, to think that part of old midtown was still laying down.
It was getting close to Seven Thirty. PG got to the store to do a little socializing before the reading. The host, Franklin Abbott, talked about the book. He said that the southern faeries had gatherings before 1979, when Harry Hay is generally believed to have founded the radical faeries.
A parade of speakers came to the microphone to read from the book. PG found a spot to stand, near the right of the speaker, where he found a good camera angle. With a bit of shifting around, the speaker was blocking some lights on the sidewalk. PG listened to the readers. At one point he felt a tear in his eye. PG realized that he is both heir to, and participant in, a fabulous cultural heritage.
The reading was over much too soon. It was time to walk around the room and collect hugs. As a final moment of the oldtimers night out, PG stopped at the Spur/Conoco/Citgo station on Cheshire Bridge Road to buy gasoline. The gas was twenty cents a gallon cheaper than the stations on Piedmont, near the park. No police were in sight.