Who may be playing
With you sur la plage.
A knight who's left behind his charger
May call you "ducky"
Won't you be lucky?
In the ocean You'll find emotion
May play you a funny game
Sur la plage, sur la plage
Ev'ryone looks the -
Ev'ryone looks the -
Ev'ryone looks the same"
...................................from THE BOYFRIEND
We drove to Old Orchard Beach in Maine last week. To celebrate my daughter Clea's birthday.
None of us had been there before. We love to go to Maine, and do so often. It's a short trip with lots of different attitudes. We like York a lot, and have gone since my kids were very little. Long Sands Beach is grand, and the waves are wonderful. There's the lighthouse of course; Nubble Light. 
And Short Sands Beach is in the beach town which boasts -- along with a variety of crap traps -- a wonderful 1950's style (remnant?) luncheonette that has a soda fountain and taffy machines creating the candy right in the store front windows. The Goldenrod actually opened in the 1890's, but the shop was rebuilt and feels very 1950's to me. And, as I've mentioned at other times, I love Ogunquit where I walk the Marginal Way, and enjoy some wonderful little restaurants and craft shops.Old Orchard Beach is carny. Helped along by the Playland Amusement Park in the middle of the little village. The residential areas on the way to the beach town are really charming; the houses with gorgeous little gardens, and a sense that all is always good. The beach area attracts many families. Very little diversity which always
disappoints me, being a New Yorker, except in the social mix. Bikers, RV'ers, Canadians, and a mixed-bag of families.
It's always remarkable to Clea and me when we are conspicuous walking down the street. Only because we've been a family since 1970; not much has changed around us. The beach itself is quite something; seven miles of water front with relatively clean, white sand. It's not San Tropez; but it serves. The food is mainly fried everything -- what one might expect at an American seaside gathering place.
We stayed one night in a less than auspicious motel. In the morning I walked down to the beach at six o'clock; a number of people were walking or jogging. It was a glorious morning -- not terribly warm yet; a good breeze; no humidity. When ever I walk a beach in early morning I spin back into my childhood at Rockaway beach; back into the early years of Massachusetts era when the children would be sleeping in the Anchorage Motel and I'd walk the beach to see the sunrise and listen to my phantom voices in the waves This walk began that way. And then a peculiar thing: these guys bringing chairs down to the sand from the rental bungalows at that early hour. Guests at the bungalows -- claiming their space for their day at the beach. It reminded me of the urban dwellers in the north east who shovel a parking space and hang on to it with chairs or barrels. Seven miles of sand. Room for all?
Maybe it's because photos of these places are often "old photos" of these places. So one expects the charm we see in the movies. "On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City...." with Fred Astaire or Judy Garland or Gordan MacRae --
Happily the children don't have this frame of reference, so for them it was a fun, carnival kind of place, where a mean grandma refused to buy them fried dough.
Go figure......!
