Of the many fun, unique events that take place annually in Shreveport-Bossier, the Spring edition of the biannual Texas Avenue Makers Fair may be the most difficult to categorize. I say this as someone who stood, a Mexico City-style street taco from Ki Mexico in hand, and watched as a Michael Jackson impersonator leapt onstage at the Spring 2011 fair, completely unannounced, and absolutely slayed an audience of 300 or so rapt onlookers. At the 2012 edition, I bought a poster-sized illustration of Mayor Cedric Glover from a guy in a gorilla suit who was dancing to electronic music blaring out of a boombox that appeared to have been carved out of a stump. It’s that kind of party.
The Texas Avenue Makers Fair returns, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., on Saturday, April 27 in the 800 block of historic Texas Avenue, near the intersection of Common Street and Texas Avenue. Vendor booths for this installment of the fair sold out in record time, with 168 booths selling out in six days. The waiting list, when I spoke to organizer Kelly McSwain, had grown to 88 vendors. That’s an incredible statistic, especially considering that the two and a half year-old festival is a completely volunteer-run effort.
“Fall 2012 was the largest we’ve ever been, and that was good and bad,” McSwain said. “Good because we were able to have more vendors. But there was a lot of backlash as well. Some of our repeat vendors were concerned about the Makers Fair becoming too large.”
This year, the event has added a food truck court adjacent to the main vendor pavilion, where food trucks like Some Like It Hot and River City Seafood will be set up. Who knows if there will be guys in gorilla suits dancing to dubstep, but my money would be on “yes.”
