Take a close look at the photo above. Men with beer bellies avert their eyes. He is too close. The tired woman is framed by twin strollers. The babies inside are dressed in grey and brown camouflage pants. Sippy cups rest in their hot hands. Their mouths are red rings of Kool Aid.

Above them all, it is a beautiful cloudless day. The trees are deep green and lush. There is an occasional light breeze. Behind this cluster, a still fleet of vans and trucks waits.

And then there is Elvis, in the middle of all of this. Here, in Riverside Park in Ypsilanti, amidst these ordinary folk. Godlike, he towers over them. His size and proportions reveal his extraordinary nature. He has been sent here, appearing suddenly, all at once—he has been beamed down or has sprung up out of the grass without warning. His white jumpsuit dazzles them. It is thick and synthetic, and it is hot outside. He sweats a little and mops it up with the red silk scarf around his neck.

He is male and female. He is an archetype, an icon—no, two archetypes, two icons. Look at the curve of his hips, the v-shaped crease in the crotch— he is a naked Venus without the hand and hank of hair preserving his modesty. He does not care if you see his womanly body through the jumpsuit. He wants you to stare.

He stands with his weight on one foot, the other leg in a half-step forward, knee slightly bent, for aesthetic reasons. His head is tilted. His jaw is square, and his face is strong despite his jowls, which he believes add a certain softness. He holds the water bottle to his lips and takes a long drink. Everything is still and silent except for the slow gulch of water moving downward in his body- in his throat, his lungs, his heart, his stomach. Nothing moves. No one says a word. No one makes eye contact. He's all alone... Elvis is lonely.

Every once in while, Ypsi gets even better. I am generally surprised when it happens. As much as I love Ypsilanti and all of it's cultural quirkiness and lovable underdog urbanism in an area surrounded by an affluent university town and newly developed farmlands. I keep expecting more of what I love about Ypsilanti to slowly ebb away, for things I love to disappear, one by one, until all that remains is a place that's like every other place near it.

But Ypsi is invents itself in a vacuum. It maintains a parallel universe of its own. In an age where Targets and Starbucks and superstore malls eat away at culture and community, Ypsi has managed to escape, miraculously powered by its inability to conform. Ypsi can't help itself.

Last July, Ypsilanti hosted the first annual Elvisfest, an official, Graceland-sanctioned event. While in Ann Arbor swarms of suburbanites crawled the streets looking for art to match their furniture at the annual Art Fair, Ypsi opened its doors to a much different crowd. Ypsi took a stand, opting for lush black velvet paintings of the King over gauzy watercolors of seascapes and metal garden doo dads.

When I first saw the flyer, I couldn't believe it was really going to happen. The whole week before, I scoured the web and newspapers, looking for evidence and rumor that it was going to really happen. After all, in Ypsi, it is sometimes difficult to discern what is real, what is an artifact of someone's dreams or imagination.

We decided to host an ElvisFest party at our house. I went to work, planning a meal fit for the King himself. I made the first meatloaf I've ever made- two huge ones. Pounds of bacon, a giant macaroni and cheese, plates of sausages, a banana pudding vanilla wafer concoction, and, for the first time ever, I bought Wonder bread for Elvis' favorite peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwich.

The afternoon of ElvisFest arrived. Mark began to fry pounds and pounds of bacon. It took forever, and soon our friends started to drift in. People got kind of giddy at the surreal sight of all the bacon, and a crowd gathered to watch. In the living room, Jen and Sandra went to work, gluing a small picture of a fat and sweaty Elvis on an endless supply of individually wrapped moist towelettes. They would come in handy with the picnic meal, and serve as a souvenir.
After a few beers at the house, we got ready to go to Elvisfest. I packed a small snack for any Elvis we might meet. I thought of it as bait—a ziplock bag containing a slice of bacon, a banana and one of the moist towelettes we'd made.

Overnight, Ypsilanti had become a tourist destination! I saw people driving around town, maps spread across dashboards, as they slowly creeped down the streets of our neighborhood looking for a place to park. It was startling—Ypsi just isn't a destination very often.
In the park, we wandered up to a stage that had apparently, been borrowed from the town of Wyandotte. Poor, poor Ypsilanti, doesn't even have their own stage and had to borrow one from a town 75 miles away!

On the stage was a blond six year old boy. I was horrified and fascinated at the same time by this sight. Little Elvis didn't actually sing (he mouthed all of the words) but he had all of the moves. He thrust his hips and the little girls (and the one little boy) who had gathered at the front of the stage squealed. Elvis threw in a couple of stylized karate chops and leaned over the crowd of children to single out one kid for a love song. He sang "Love Me Tender" as he held the hand of a little girl. He dropped her hand and looked longingly at another little girl. Then he took off his silk scarf, and reached out through the throng of waving little girl hands to hand it to the boy.
We stood and marveled at the sight. It was gross, and sick, and wonderful in a dirty and wrong kind of way. According to the program, that poor six year old had been performing Elvis since he was three. What kind of parents did he have? What would his life be like? Would he ever rebel, or would he grow up and be an Elvis tribute artist?

And then the next performer came onstage. His name was Leo Days, and he was young, and had pretty eyes. By far, he was the hottest Elvis we'd seen yet, and the crowd seemed to agree. Women suddenly rushed the stage as he appeared. It was contagious. We were all excited to see the cute, young Elvis, especially having seen so many old fat Elvises walking around. Dawn gave a me a push, and I found myself in the middle of the women, yelling and screaming.
The appeal of Leo Days is that he is neither the young spry Elvis, which no tribute artist seems to be able to reproduce, or the common old fat one that is easy to capture with a wig, your own belly and a pantsuit. He was somewhere in between, and it was endearing. He was just 22, and he knew how to do Elvis' sneer so that for a brief moment, he looked just like Elvis. Then it dissolved and he was just a kind of pretty boy. You could see panty lines of his briefs under his jumpsuit. It was strangely appealing. I guess I've never seen a boy with panty lines before.
But then, at the heart of his momentary attractiveness, is the problem. What makes a 22 year-old guy opt to be Elvis? This is not someone whose parents have crafted them into Elvis, this is a boy who chooses this! He should be in a band of his own, attracting women his own age rather than a swarm of old and ugly women who are lusting over his slight resemblance to the King.
We had a bag full of Elvis towelettes with us, offerings to any Elvis we might meet, as a sort of a tribute to the tribute artists. We showered Elvis and the stage with little packages of moist towelettes. One hit him in the shoulder and he bent down to pick it up after his song ended. "What is this?" he intoned in a deep Elvis voice. I think he thought it was a condom. "It's a towelette! A moist towelette!" we yelled. "Hmm..." he said. The way he was talking back to us in the Elvis voice was thrilling. "I'll use this later..."

I'm a little bitter because the hottie Elvis spurned me. I was in the middle of a swarm of lusty old women with frosted hair, waving my arm around in front of him as he sang a tender ballad and screaming with the rest of them, and I thought, "Surely, he will single me out and give me one of those silk scarfs that say Elvis... how he could he not?"Alas, it's hard to be rejected by The King, or by a 22 year-old boy who chooses to flirt with someone's grandma instead of you.
But I recovered. After all, there were many more Elvises in the park. Walking over the tridge (Ypsilanti is home to the only tridge, a bridge that goes in three directions instead of two) Kari and I encountered another young Elvis. This one was from the karaoke stage where the non-headlining Elvises appeared. He wasn't really one of the good ones, you could tell that he was just a guy dressed up. He was young and wiry. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses and a black jumpsuit with gold sequins on it. I felt a little shy talking to this Elvis but Kari didn't. "Hey, she has a snack for you Elvis!" she said. I felt a little bit like we were talking to Mickey Mouse at Disneyland, a person inside of a suit. I gave him the bag with the bacon and the banana in it, and he opened it up. "Hey, is this poison?" he asked. This Elvis didn't do an Elvis voice when we spoke to him. We told him it wasn't and he ate the bacon while we watched. We invited him over to our house and I tried to explain where it was. The Elvis acted like he was understanding my directions and said he would try to come over later.

I felt giddy about the prospect of getting an Elvis over to the house. I could finally find out what makes these guys do this, all of my questions could be answered. We could drink beer under the trees, he could be a celebrity among us, and we could invite more Elvii so he'd be able to talk to them in a non-competitive environment too. And maybe if we were lucky there would be a sing-along...

That was when I realized the scope of Elvisfest. This guy wasn't even from Michigan, he had traveled far to come to this event and perform on the karaoke stage. He would never find our house even though it was just two blocks away. The only way that we would be able to score some Elvii for the party would be if we had some kind of shuttle service from the park to the house. For next year, I'll try to organize this. We have to keep trying, the possibilities are too great to dismiss.

We walked back to the house and ate. I returned to the park a couple of more times that day. I lost some money pretty quickly playing bingo in the freighthouse, and spent the rest of the time walking around watching the people. I didn't succeed at collecting any Elvises, I blame the heat and the beer and rich food for making me lazy.

It's almost time for the second annual Ypsilanti ElvisFest, and I'm eagerly looking forward to it. Among the events, there will be a children's tractor pull (what the hell is that?), an Elvis movie-a-thon, gospel shows, and a pork cook-off. For more information, visit www.mielvisfest.org.

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