For many years, whenever weather and space have permitted, musicians have performed on the streets of downtown Wilmington.  It is a natural, logical response to living in a community possessed of many visitors, a thriving downtown entertainment scene and an appropriate climate.  For the second consecutive year, the City of Wilmington Recreation Division “would like to invite you to take part in Sundown Shindig on the River,” which is just like what would be happening downtown anyway, except that bureaucrats get to tell musicians when to stand where and to take credit for the music, the climate and the visitors.

Because we do have musicians, visitors and a climate conducive to the musicians and visitors encountering one another on the streets, the bureaucrats will congratulate one another for a rousing success at the end of the second Sundown Shindig season.  The local music press, always eager to suck up to big entities like the City and extraordinarily gifted in rolling turds into joyful exclamation points, will blather in support.  The musicians gain nothing from doing under City auspices what they have done independently for some time.