Heading into town on Weaver Street this morning, I glanced to my left and thought I'd wandered into a time warp. There in one corner of the Weaver Street Market lawn, three guys were shoveling sand into a giant wooden form and packing it down tight, while Rick Hermanson directed the operation.
Hermanson used to build a huge, fantastically elaborate sand sculpture on the lawn every year — many of you probably remember the striking one he created after 9/11. He stopped doing them three years ago after he and Weaver Street had a disagreement about the market's use of water in its fountain.
Thursday, he said he'd decided he had made his point and it was time to let it go, and Weaver Street invited him to do a sand sculpture for its 20th anniversary celebration this weekend.
What's his plan?
"It'll have the hula hoopers and stuff on one side," he said. "And the other side will be, like, starving people in Africa."
Come again?
"That's just me," Hermanson said. "I gotta have the dark side in there too. Yin and yang."
