Come See Provincetown, See The Wonders, See The People!… It Sounds Like A Circus Barker

Today is Carnival in Provincetown!

I love P’town, that is one of the reasons that I got a cottage on the Cape. It is a very welcoming place for us. Last weekend I had a trans friend up at the cottage and we went out to dinner at a restaurant in town (Wellfleet) and I was people watching (our table had a window seat and was in the corner, so I was facing the corner and I could only look out of the window) and a saw a couple of gay couples and a lesbians couple come in. We went around to different Cape Cod National Seashore areas and talked to some of the rangers and they never batted an eye lash as two trans women came up to them to ask them questions.

Provincetown does have an eclectic mix people in this Yankee Magazine article they write it,

13 Reasons Why We Love Cape Cod: Everything ElseWorld-class lifeguards, a classic summer cocktail, people-watching in P-town, a talking clam, and more. Here are even more reasons why we love Cape Cod.
Yankee Magazine
April 10, 2019

There are so many reasons to make a summer escape to the Cape and Islands, in fact, that we filled more than two dozen pages of Yankee’s May/June issue with a selection of our favorites, including things to see, things to do, and things to eat. But that still wasn’t enough! Here’s a look at even more reasons we love Cape Cod.

And one of them is P’town.

People-Watching in Provincetown
I am a person who forgets things—names, the dates of essential historical events, where I was two Christmases ago. I blame this partly on genetics (my dad is famously forgetful) and partly on the drugs I experimented with in college, some of which I remember.

But I haven’t forgotten the first time I visited Provincetown. I was a 27-year-old Californian who had recently relocated to Boston, a city I found beautiful but not as interesting as San Francisco, the once-quirky place where I grew up. A few months into my new New England life, I was told by gays, writers, and an opinioned grandmother from South Boston that I must visit a place called P-town, at the tip of a place called Cape Cod. Norman Mailer also recommended it. “There could be no other town like it,” he wrote.

I arrived by boat in July (as one does), and after a short walk along a pier I found myself on Commercial Street, the town’s main drag, where a seemingly unusual but actually quite common P-town summer scene played out before me. There was John Waters on a bicycle. There was a drag queen with terrific posture laughing about something with a family from Ohio. There was a tank top–wearing young man on a moped stopping (too abruptly!) to flirt with tank top–wearing young men on a balcony. There were townies just trying to get to the post office. There was a middle-aged lesbian couple talking to their dog. There was an older man (in his 50s) and a younger man (in his 20s) walking together and smiling, and I couldn’t be sure if they were lovers or father and son. There was a large man in a harness carrying a small man in a Speedo. There was a street performer playing the piano. There were teenagers from the suburbs, grown men from Dallas, a shirtless Jamaican on a skateboard, a painter lugging his supplies, an activist shouting to be heard, and a handsome man who seemed like trouble. (I would come to learn that my instincts were correct: He was running away from many things, including quite possibly the authorities. People come to P-town to lose themselves and to find themselves.)

I remember when we used to spend a couple of weeks at a cottage in North Truro and when we went into P’town my father used to call Bohemian and the street were lined by street artist who would paint your portrait or a caricature drawing on street corners. There were many famous artists and writers who spent time in P’town; Eugene O’Neill, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Anthony Bourdain, Mary Oliver, and E.E. Cummings all spent time in P’town. (A good movie to watch is “Packed in a Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson”). I later learned that my parents went on their honeymoon in Provincetown back in the 30’s

I'm heading up there this morning for the weekend.