Along the Way

Samantha, a fiftysomething woman wearing a dress with polka dots the size of cookies, is lying face down on the sidewalk just outside the door of the Arizona Appliance Mart. John, a hulking man with a ponytail and a long, crinkly beard, is standing on her back. A murmuring crescent of onlookers bulges around.

"You're strong but tense," John says. "Real tense."

"I'm in real estate," she retorts. "Does that explain it?"

John slowly walks up and down Samantha's prone figure, moderating his 170-pound body weight by grasping the parallel steel bars at his sides. He tells the crowd to help themselves to his business cards on a table to his left. He's John Murphy, a licensed massage therapist who specializes in "walk-on-your-back massages;" gets into the "deeper layers" of muscles, he says. Half a dozen people wait to pay $5 to get walked on.

Less than a block away, two men playing plastic toy instruments a guitar and a banjo sit in chairs and plink two chords over and over and over. They are terrible beyond description, and they know it. The banjo player is Dan Buckley, classical music critic of the Tucson Citizen.

What is this act?

"It's a style of music we call 'struggling,'" Buckley says.

And why?

"I've been trying to convince the publisher I need a raise."

Farther up the street, artist Bill Bernard sits in his tiny studio watching a river of people ripple slowly past his finely detailed prints of ocelots, wolves, and owls. He beams at the traffic. "It's the one day of the month that I know for sure I'm going to sell something," he explains.

This is Downtown Saturday Night, a monthly happening that for a few hours transforms a three-block section of Tucson's East Congress into something that is part bazaar, part arts festival, and, most significantly, part community-wide block party. It isn't merely another street fair every city has those, and they have become as standardized as shopping malls. Downtown Saturday Night is a celebration of the indelible funkiness that thrives in Tucson's soul even as the city poses, more and more, as a serious metropolis. No Phoenix newspaper critic would be found on the street playing a plastic banjo, a simple fact that helps explain the difference between the two cities.

These parties, staged on the first Saturday of each month for the last two years, also have helped Tucsonans feel increasingly good about their downtown. As in so many other cities, it went comatose in the 1970s when most retail business migrated out to the shopping strips. For most of a century, Congress Street had been the city's great commercial artery, and, in just a few years, it decayed into a sad, tattered strip of vacant storefronts plastered with the handbills of doomsday prophets. Nobody else went there.

But in the mid-'80s, attracted by the honey of cheap rent, a few artists began renovating the old stores into studios. Some even lived there, quietly dodging zoning laws. It wasn't yet an urban renaissance, but there was at least a heartbeat. Then the city council folded East Congress into a new downtown Arts District, and galleries and restaurants followed the artists' lead.

East Congress now is the cutting edge of Tucson's downtown comeback, and these Saturday night parties show how far it has come. The street is alive with crowds, just as it used to be with Saturday morning shoppers many years ago. The galleries and cafés all stay open at least until 9:00 P.M., masseurs and musicians of all

sorts work the streets, and old

friends bump into each other and trade exclamations about what a great small town Tucson, population 620,000, still is. You don't assess the health of an urban heart by measuring its skyline; you take its pulse here, at street level. Diversity is the best sign of all because it means not only entertainment but education: we learn most from people who are unlike us. Roaming Congress on Downtown Saturday Night are families, retirees, punks, German tourists, Mexican musicians, Rastafarians, poseurs, artists, entrepreneurs, environmentalists passing petitions, Cops for Christ passing out tracts - the list winds on, comprising everything a great downtown should be.

"I've not yet actually made a sale during the evening," says Dave Moyer, an artist whose gallery, Color For Its Own Sake, is in the Hotel Congress. "The reason I do it is the positive feedback I get from these crowds of people. It's a big motivator to keep painting."

Betsy Beard, a vivacious, irrepressibly cheerful young singer, spends Downtown Saturday Night standing inside a plywood jukebox, singing a cappella. She is professionally trained, and her voice is gorgeous. This is her dream, she says, being a human jukebox. "There's no other way I could get to sing all these songs I love," she explains. "I don't care for nightclubs. This way you get to sing for one person at a time."

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS' PRODUCTS AT DISCOUNT PRICES

The fourth annual Arizona Highways Spring Sale will be held from 9:00 A.M. until 2:00 P.M. Saturday, April 6, in the magazine's parking lot at 2039 W. Lewis Ave.

The sale is a once-a-year opportunity to purchase at a discount the items produced by Arizona Highways, including scenic travel books, greeting cards, note cards, clothing, back issues of the magazine, and a variety of gift items.

For more information, call (602) 258-6641.