Everything must go!

This weekend, Nup and myself MC'd an urban garage sale. What is an urban garage sale, you ask? It is a garage sale held within the limits of a major city, at a dwelling that is probably lacking a garage, and likely even lacking nearby legal parking spaces.

Most people are familiar with the suburban garage sale, to which hard-core yard salers flock in the early AM hours of summer weekends in their roomy vehicles, spot-check for old records and antiques, and speed away within a nanosecond. In the suburbs, the last of your traffic is probably going to dry up by 10:00 a.m. We learned this weekend that the urban g-sale is a different beast. Firstly, expect little action before noon, when bed-headed, trendy young couples with purebred dogs begin to prowl the sidewalks, in search of espresso. They will likely be followed by an assortment of curious neighbors, sidewalk drifters, and people seeking new friends and spontaneous sidewalk events.

Secondly, in the city, expect people to wonder aloud why you are selling your belongings. In the suburbs, no one would dream of asking why you were trying to lose three toasters, 100 lbs of knicknacks, or old shoes for a dollar. They would know that you were cleaning out your garage. In the city, young persons who love ironic and ridiculous household items like Japanese Sweek tins demand to know: "are you moving out of the country? Why would you get rid of all this cool shit?" whatever offhanded answer you might give them ("gotta pay the rent"), they always solemnly commiserate: "I feel for you, man. That's rough. But you have kick ass taste in CD's."

Our sale had a few special items, to say the least, which upgraded the sidewalk circus factor to some extent. There might have been a Mork from Ork talking rag doll and Bill & Ted's Wyld Stallyns Jam Session action figure set among thousands of other action figure cast offs from Nup's eBay reseller days a decade ago, which brought consistently incredulous peals of laughter from irony-loving local coolsters, some of whom returned in waves to buy second and third sets of 1980's action figure memorabilia as gifts.

But where was I? The special features of the urban g-sale: it's more than a sale. It's a gathering place. It's a sidewalk performance. It's an open-air cafe, with no coffee, but with incredible bargains on stuff that young people living in hovels can put to good use. A few of our customers were upgraded to "friends of the garage sale" due to their propensity for lingering for over an hour, returning with friends, and/or repeatedly proclaiming that we, our stuff, and our sale were the coolest thing they had ever seen. "I am so glad I met you guys," said one nouveau-hippie type, who promised to return a third time to consider the purchase of a levitating globe desk toy once he determined that the electromagnetic field would not cause undue disturbance in his personal force.

I think it's safe to say that, after price-stickering junk for hours, nailing signs to utility poles, dragging card tables down staircases, and posting internet ads with digital pictures attached, the overall effort was not worth the modest stack of $10 bills we each made off with. But it's hard to beat being the talk of a two-block radius for a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon, and getting rid of three toasters and a giant plastic bag of rubber aliens that you had no use for anymore.

Note I can't believe I forgot to mention that in mid-afternoon, this old guy in suspenders tripped over a bike Nup had for sale, and did a spectacular backsplash into a giant hedge. It seemed for one awful second, as he groaned and clutched his chest, and a small crowd closed in around him, as though he was having a garage sale heart attack. Fortunately, they pulled him up and dusted him off, and all was well. The bike never sold, however.