It was late Saturday afternoon and the Arts on the Edge festival was ending, but there is still a long line of children waiting to have balloon animals built to their specifications by the unflappable Evan Gambardella, who is committed to inflating and stretching balloons until every last tot is satisfied. Festival cleaner-uppers come and take away his table; he moves his wares to the brick ledge of a deserted storefront. That surface proves too hot and jagged for balloons, so Gambardella shifts across the street, and the line of customers follow as if they were the string on an errant balloon on a gusty day. He keeps pumping and twisting outside Creative Arts Workshop (which really, come to think of it, should offer a workshop on balloon animal craftsmanship). Dogs, monkeys, aliens emerge from his nimble hands. My own children get the balloons they sought, and we head down the street for coffee—you know, at Koffee? Half an hour later, we glance down the block and Gambardella’s still at it. You can’t pop this guy.

 

Just as we’re leaving the coffeeshop, one of the workers cleaning up the street ambles up with some of the gigantic round balloons which decorated Audubon Street during the festival. We walk them gingerly home, about eight blocks.

 

As we pass Toad’s, I notice a familiar face—familiar from music videos and from one of my favorite rock albums released last year.

“You’re from Titus Andronicus, right?”

“Yes,” says the band’s lead singer Patrick Stickles, grinning in his rabid-dog manner, then quizzes me amiably about the balloons. He wants me to bring them to the club for that night’s show. Titus Andronicus is all about off-the-cuff punk pageantry.

I thank him for playing so often in New Haven. “We love New Haven,” he says.

On days like Saturday, so do I.