Sheepish

That's what I am, having failed to visit the park because I was hanging out with other bloggers, talking about how I blog about visiting the park every day. But it was delightful to finally attend a meeting of the traveling road show that calls itself the Brooklyn Blogade; more than a dozen of us enjoyed the Montenegran hospitality of a sweet little family-run restaurant on Church Avenue called the Old Brick Cafe. (For a lagniappe, we got tiny Croatian chocolate bars.) A very pleasing wealth of writing talent, lavished on a startling range of passions, was in evidence, from familiars like Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn (where some nice excerpts are posted), Luna Park Gazette, and Flatbush Gardener, and from new-to-me Brooklyn transplants Shellytown and Midnight Cowgirls (two fresh and original voices I liked a lot). Thanks to Bad Girl Blog's Joyce Hanson for organizing a convivial event in my neck of the woods.

Those sheep, by the way, roamed Prospect Park in the 1890s, and had an actual shepherd—three of them, in fact, working shifts. The shepherds fell quite short in the picturesque-charm department, according to this 1895 story in the New York Times that dripped with tedious archness (the curse of the era's feature journalism). The sheep also displayed a bit too much Brooklyn attitude; they had "tipped over two baby carriages and tumbled out the babies and bundles on the ground" while cadging for snacks, according to the shepherd. (No word of any associated injuries was supplied; the sheep were reported to be fearful of rats, squirrels and dogs, but no mention was made of lawyers.)

I do like the robust language used in Times headlines back then. "Greedy and timid," "inquisitive to the point of boldness"...I am more sheepish than I realized!

Comments

[onlytheblogknowsbrooklyn]

Hey Brenda. I couldn't find the piece you read at the Blogade. Please send to me. louise_crawford(at)yahoo(dot)com