BLUEGRASS: A chilly, rainy, terrific fest

We had a great time Saturday listening to old-time music and people-watching at the Delaware Valley Bluegrass Festival, which is held each Labor Day weekend at the Salem County (N.J.) Fairground.
The music started on Friday, but we got there on Wednesday evening for two reasons: to pitch our tent and to claim our space in the main performance pavilion by setting up our folding chairs. Even though the campground had just opened, dozens of RVs were already there; you could hear people jamming, and the folks in the space next to us had already set up and lit their tiki torches (South Jersey mosquitoes don't mess around).
The entire main pavilion was already full of chairs by the time we got there, but we found a good spot in the secondary pavilion.
The most memorable performers were Tuba Skinny, an ensemble whose style was more New Orleans street jazz than traditional old-time music. The band included, yes, a tuba and other brass instruments, a clarinet and even a washboard, played with gusto by an extremely loose-jointed fellow. The audience seemed to love it, dancing around while bobbing their umbrellas up and down.
The rain, sometimes heavy, actually added to the fun. To stay dry, there were folks wearing firehouse bunker gear, nautical foul-weather gear, floor-length Western-style canvas dusters, and those nubby Mexican ponchos that were all the rage in the 1970s. A guy in a transparent orange poncho looked just like a Creamsicle.
I stared fascinated as one very tall man, wearing a desert-camo jacket and matching knee-length skirt, unfolded a pair of camo pants, threaded a belt through the belt loops and then managed to put it on while simultaneously removing the skirt.
Hat-wise, I saw people wearing clear-plastic pixie hoods, a beret, a conical Chinese-style hat, Stetsons, straw hats and ball caps. The rainbow of umbrellas included an impractical white Mary Poppins parasol, a full-sized two-tiered porch umbrella, and umbrellas with newspaper logos on them (do newspapers still give away premiums?).
The many kids at the fest, of course, didn't mind getting wet in the least. We had fun watching them jump into puddles and steer their bikes across the flooded grassy areas, the deeper the better.
Along with the rain, it didn't get above 70 degrees all day Saturday. A woman said to me in the ladies' room that she was wearing so many layers of clothes, she was sure she'd walk out of the restroom with the wrong layer pulled up and the wrong one pulled down.
My still-soggy hat goes off to the Brandywine Friends of Old-Time Music, the group who organizes this fest.