For nearly fourteen years, Carole Carroll has been the lead organizer for an annual fundraiser of considerable local renown called Night of 100 Elvises. The show is built around a singular, irresistible notion: The continent's finest Elvis tribute performers (not "impersonators," please) trade stage time with raucous Baltimore-area bands to plumb the depths of the King's back catalog. (One of the rules of the show—which now sprawls across two nights—decrees that no song can be repeated.) Tickets are $50 each, but the thousand-plus attendees—a pan-generational mix of Elvis faithful, younger rock-scene types, and assorted local characters—are encouraged to consume heroic quantities of food and drink as they sample the three floors of live music and Elvis-themed entertainment. The event is held in Southwest Baltimore's Lithuanian Hall, a stately monument to this hard-luck neighborhood's immigrant past, and the venue contributes its own cultural incongruities to the proceedings, via the gallons of sweet viryta—a homemade honey liqueur of vague Lithuanian-American provenance—dispensed to unwary partygoers in the wood-paneled basement bar.

At some point late in the evening, says Carroll, things tend to reach a peak. Maybe it's when one of the more accomplished Elvises scales the high notes at the end of "An American Trilogy," that big Vegas-era showstopper. Maybe it's when the all-female Graceliners—a troupe of matronly Canadians in rhinestoned jumpsuits—ascend the stage for their eagerly anticipated set. But eventually all the heat and smoke and sideburns and Baltic moonshine combust into a kind of benign madness that Carroll has dubbed "The Roar," and if you stand out in the cold December air on the sidewalk off Hollins Street, you can feel the building tremble under its sway. "People are so out of their minds with joy and happiness that there's a roar out on the street," she explains. "It's like a train racing down a hill. There's no stopping it."

In conception and execution, Night of 100 Elvises serves as a distillation of Baltimore's idea of a good time: the low-budget DIY glamour, the mash-up of oddball ingredients, the abundance of beer and fried food, the embrace of kitsch so fervent that it achieves a kind of purity. There is an actual charity element to all this (the Johns Hopkins Children's Center gets the net profits, and CD sales and raffles benefit Hungry for Music), but the goodwill that suffuses the evening is of a more cosmic nature. Years ago, I played guitar in a band that donated its services to this cause, and the seven minutes we spent onstage bashing out a two-song set ("Long Black Limousine" and "Polk Salad Annie") were among the most memorable in our otherwise undistinguished musical career. But this was more than just a good gig; it was a glimpse of a better world, a thousand strangers welded into one under a seven-hour siege of music and honeyed liqueur. "We want people to feel like they can't take any more," says Carroll. "People tell me that this is their New Year's Eve."

The social value of partying is a difficult thing to quantify. (Not so the costs, of course.) In her recent book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, the writer and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich argues that humanity has an innate psychological need to gather in groups, bond with strangers, and exult, a need that has been systematically squelched in recent centuries. She fingers several villains in this drama—industrialization, Western imperialism, the rise of global capitalism, fundamentalist religious movements, and a rogue's gallery of post-Reformation fun police. Under the banner of progress and civilization, these forces—typically social elites resisting any breakdown of class boundaries—have stamped out or co-opted the seasonal festivals, street carnivals, impromptu dance parties, and assorted ecstatic rites that once sustained the masses.

The unintended result: a host of social problems, including an "epidemic of melancholy" that swept Europe in the eighteenth century, a thriving modern industry in antidepressants and other pharmaceutical mood interventions, and the steady erosion of connectedness and community values as we retreat further into our solitary electronic amusements. We now live, Ehrenreich declares, in a "postfestive era," one in which opportunities to experience the healing power of collective merriment are typically limited to sporting events, rock concerts, or other commercial enterprises.

This may be news to the average American college student, who does not seem to suffer from a dearth of ecstatic rites. But for the rest of us, there is a certain resonance to the idea that modern urban existence offers few chances to properly cut loose with our fellow citizens. Part of the blame must lie in the paradox of city living itself—the fraught state of being simultaneously attracted to and menaced by the stranger multitudes around us. Wealth and class disparities in Baltimore remain profound; the veil of civilization is thin enough around here: Why, with many urban areas struggling to maintain the basics of a civil society, invite the unbound mob into the streets? And sell them beer?





Local history does not lack for legendary shindigs. Free State settlers came from more festive stock than the dour Protestants who landed elsewhere. Federal Hill once billed itself as "the neighborhood named after a party"—a reference to a grog-fueled observance of the state's ratification of the U.S. Constitution held atop the hill in 1788—and the British retreat from Fort McHenry in 1814 inspired such citywide revelry that some of the more pious defenders were scandalized. A more buttoned-down affair is credited by many with helping heal the psychic scars inflicted by the white flight and racial unrest of the late 1960s. First held in 1970, the grandly titled Baltimore City Fair invited a broken and frightened populace to venture back downtown and moon-bounce together for an afternoon; improbably, it worked. A decade later, Harborplace birthed the "festival marketplace" idea—a sort of permanent street fair trapped in a shopping mall—and a constellation of municipal whateverfests around town now span the sweltering months. (The City Fair, having outlived its purpose, faded away in 1991.)

 Regardless of ethnicity or address, by August they all start to look and smell the same: Here, the undercooked-chicken -on-a-stick booth; there, the Caribbean steel drum band. But do not take them for granted.

"There's research that shows that these kinds of festivals really do increase the health of a community," says Steven Rivelis, a business consultant who founded the Charles Village Parade ten years ago. A field of academic endeavor called community psychology, he says, offers abundant proof of this effect, detailing exactly how the collaborative exercise of organizing and putting on such events serves to stitch neighbors to each other and to the larger city around them. "They create a certain gestalt about how things happen. Taking over the streets is a collective action." 

A former Planned Parenthood lobbyist, Rivelis and wife Linda Brown Rivelis launched their firm, Campaign Consultation, Inc., in 1988 to advise businesses and nonprofits on the finer points of corporate citizenship and community-building. He is also, clearly, a man who loves a parade: He organized his first fundraising march in junior high. "I don't even remember how it happened. I just started doing it."

The Charles Village version came about a few years after the Rivelises were hired to advise the Charles Village Community Benefits District's neighborhood improvement efforts, with Rivelis' involvement with the parade as a citizen volunteer. Held on the first weekend in June, the parade formally kicks off the two-day festival, and it is an ad-hoc affair, full of homemade costumes, invisible-baton twirlers, and neighborhood guys marching with gardening tools. Nevertheless, the event has proven to be an effective means of maintaining the area's recent rebirth. "Neighbors get on committees together, and that connectedness keeps growing," Rivelis says. "Those of us who've been doing this for a few years have a lot of stories. People come to Charles Village to watch the parade and then say, ‘Hey, those are nice homes.' Then I see them next year and they live here."

Molly Ross, the artist/impresario who helms the Great Halloween Lantern Parade in Patterson Park every October, is an equally passionate advocate for the community-building potential of what she calls "the celebratory arts." Her Halloween extravaganza is a regional phenom, with 1,200 participants processing through the nighttime park with elaborate candlelit lanterns. The marchers—most of them neighborhood residents—create their lanterns in free workshops at the Creative Alliance, sponsored by Ross' studio, Nana Projects. Last year, 3,500 people came to participate or watch. "It's a beautiful experience in the moment, but the impressive thing is the impact it has months later," she says.

Part of that effect is the simple enchantment of seeing the familiar transformed. The parade succeeds merely by bringing children and families into a large city park at night, offering residents the chance to reclaim otherwise disputed territory, if only for a few hours. Last month, Ross hosted a "Parade School," teaching visiting community organizers how to save the world through stiltwalking and giant puppetry. A spectacle such as the one that Ross oversees may represent a massive investment in time and labor, but the payoff, Ross insists, is incalculable. "It's a doorway into other things happening —people talking with each other, working with each other."

Not all mass celebrations, of course, can claim such a lofty social agenda. One of Baltimore's biggest parties is also among the most explicitly Dionysian, the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico. On paper, it's difficult to argue that the storied Preakness has any redeeming social benefits. It lumbers into view each May, a bloated Goodyear Blimp of corporate events and commercial sponsorships deployed in the service of a day of drinking and gambling. And yet, if the weather is pleasant and no horses get themselves killed, an afternoon at Old Hilltop—even amid the Hobbesian humanity of the infield—can be a joyous thing, a blessed release from normative behavior, a beery communal rite with 120,000 of your new closest friends.

 "You don't need to go to church to pray," says Dan Van Allen, the artist and community organizer whose métier is the pursuit of what French sociologist Émile Durkheim dubbed "collective effervescence"—the sacred energy generated by a properly motivated gathering of like-minded souls. For years, Van Allen oversaw the Sowebohemian Arts and Music Festival, the Memorial Day weekend bash that fills the streets near his Hollins Market home. He's also the founding spirit behind the Inter-Tribal Powwow, held a few weeks before the Sowebo Fest at Ferry Bar Park, an isolated strip of industrial beachfront near the Hanover Street Bridge. Free, unpublicized, and only nominally legal, the Powwow is ostensibly a fundraiser for the Arabber Preservation Society (another Van Allen project), but it began life in 1988, as a boat-launching party for a homemade outrigger canoe Van Allen had built. "We pretty much cobbled it together with vans and a beer truck and some umbrellas we found on the beach," he says of the show.

Two decades later, the Powwow has made only incremental steps toward middle-aged respectability. A generator provides power for a procession of bands clanging away on two stages, and a few vendors sell food and drinks. There are a few portable toilets, and the remote site is now bordered by a Wal-Mart, but the shaggy, anarchic Road Warrior vibe persists. As does the name, a bit of Native American cultural appropriation that reflects Van Allen's inclusive tendencies, or perhaps his Iroquois great-grandfather. The tribes that gather here are indeed a varied lot: middle-aged bikers, costumed ravers and hippie kids, alternadads toting toddlers. Despite his word-of-mouth approach, Van Allen is concerned that the Powwow is too popular now, too much like every other street festival in town—he wants to cut one of the music stages next year, and emphasize the art installations. "It's a misconception to think of these festivals as parties. I consider them cultural events."



In my twenties, an appearance at the Powwow was a ritual obligation among my peers, even when the changeable spring weather and lack of amenities made the event something of a physical ordeal. This year, after a lengthy hiatus, I again ventured down the lonely road past the Wal-Mart to meet some friends by the river. Instead of the usual plastic bag full of cans of beer, I brought my 3-year-old daughter. This was not the novelty I expected: It was a rare perfect day, with a stiff breeze off the Middle Branch, and packs of other children romped along the beach, oblivious to the freakery around them. Were all these kids here ten years ago? And had it really been ten years?

A man in a giant rabbit head wandered by. "Look at the bunny," my daughter said. A bit later, the rabbit head reappeared on top of a speaker cabinet, on fire. We left before the sun set, when things get strange. But she said she had a good time, and next year, we'll probably come back.

This, Van Allen says, is as it should be. "It's very instinctive to have these annual things," he says. "It helps us keep track of our lives, and our futures."