A dash of freshness is adding life to the 26-year- old A Taste of Colorado.
Of course, the venerable hallmarks of the festival remain, but this year’s Civic Center park gala has just enough new stuff to stem any hint of tedium.
“Dad! A Rey Mysterio mask!” says 11-year-old Andre Brooks. “That’s like $50 on the Internet.”
Moments later, Andre is shrouded in a shiny blue Lucha Libre mask, the same worn by his favorite wrestler.
“You don’t know Rey Mysterio?” he says to a baffled bystander. “He’s 5-(foot)-6, 175 pounds. He has the Intercontinental Championship. My friends are going to be so surprised.”
Arturo Ortiz came to his first Taste of Colorado festival from El Paso to sell his Mexican wrestling masks, or mascaras de lucha libre. His stand, bedecked with a rainbow menagerie of fanciful masks, is surrounded by curious gawkers and buyers.
“Business,” Ortiz says through a red devil mask, “is good.”
Across the park, Buddy Mitchell’s new business is bustling. He’s got four blue lights illuminating the peroxide-slathered teeth of festivalgoers. After 20 minutes of gape-mouth lighting, those teeth are whiter. A line is forming and by the end of the day, Mitchell hopes to have whitened the teeth of 150 people, at $99 a pop. Not bad for a general contractor whose basement refinishing business took a nose dive last fall.
“It’s a great business. Certainly saved me,” says Mitchell, who paid $3,000 for a festival booth for his DaVinci teeth whitening operation anchored at the Colorado Mills Mall.
“My teeth are definitely whiter,” says Leilani Wang after her 20-minute session under the blue light.
Now don’t worry, while there are a few things new, the tried-and-true staples are ever present at the Denver festival of food and music. It is impossible to take five steps without seeing someone gnawing a femur-sized turkey leg.
Kent Strange estimates he’ll move more than 2,000 of the gargantuan bird appendages over the weekend. Asking a precise amount is like “asking how much you make,” says Strange, who has been peddling meaty turkey legs for 22 of the Taste’s 26 years.
The festival “hasn’t changed all that much” over the years, Strange says.
“This year, there’s a bunch of different food. I like that,” he says.
Plates of fried alligator and curried goat sell beside Taste favorites like fried dough buried in powdered sugar and roasted corn on the cob. Eating from a clenched fist remains a Taste pastime, with all varieties of food offered on a stick: meat, fruit, cake and even fried pickles.
Amadou Mbaye is hawking African shea butter. Visitors are grabbing handfuls of the yellow butter and rubbing into their backs, knees, shoulders.
“It’s a miracle cream. A gift from God,” Mbaye booms, promising the butter harvested from Africa’s shea tree nut will cure all ills, including arthritis, itchy skin and high blood pressure. It’s his first Taste of Colorado in 10 years. While he’s busy — selling pints of the waxy elixir for $15 — it’s not like it was a decade ago, he says.
“Before was much better. People are more careful with how they spend now. Only things they need,” he says between bursts of butter pitching. “It makes me wonder if America will ever be sweet the way it used to be.”
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com
