Our block party

One of the contributing factors to my outburst of block pride yesterday was also the primary factor in a spectacular hangover today. (It was worth it.)

Other factors included:

• Waking up to a bouncing reggae bass-line.  Someone shouting out their window, “Good moooooorning, Prospect Place!”

• Neighbors taking turns on the mic MCing, toasting one another between airhorn samples and dancehall grooves.

• A seemingly endless supply of jerk chicken.

• My one of my neighbors, Rachel, loaning her digital camera to a five or six-year-old neighborhood girl.  The girl ran around for the next hour taking everyone’s portrait, experimenting with the zoom and framing. “Say CHEEESE!” she’d say, regardless of how intoxicated you were. Who could resist smiling? Before you could recover from the flash, she’d flip the camera around to show you your beaming mug on the LCD screen. “See?!” (Needless to say, she got some great poses. Every shot is taken from a low angle, a kid’s eye view.)

• Chatting with Bernadene, Prospect Place’s block association president/grand matriarch. She’s lived here over for 30 years, owns two apartment buildings and began the annual block party tradition. She said she was initially drawn to the first building because it had a long driveway where her kids could play, protected from the street by a heavy iron gate.  The gate is usually open, now. Now her grandson tears up and down the sidewalk on his tricycle.

• Bernadene had boxes of white T-shirts with the phrase “THINK WE BEFORE ME” printed in bold green letters. Almost everyone was wearing one by the end of the night, which (I think?) was around 4 a.m.

I mean it: the best in Brooklyn.