In the end, we all agreed the skaters were pretty cool.

Yes, my friend Ron, who owns the 40-acre field where “Camp Skatelite” set up to house a possible thousand skaters and BMXers, said they woke him up at midnight with loud music. But he wasn’t bothered by it. “They were just having fun,” he told me.

And in our little village, this is what we were treated to:

(all photos courtesy Anne Whirledge-Karp)

DANG.

He actually landed this.

I didn’t get to see much–I had to work. BUT, when all the professional skaters and BMXers and all the amateur-but-still-amazing boys (yup, all boys! come on, gals, where were ya?) took off on Sunday, this is what the Skatelite company left behind as a permanent gift for our island kids:

Pretty sweet, huh?

2-5,000 people? More like a thousand. No one got seriously hurt. All-night partying? Yeah,the Seniors whose housing abuts the half-pipe venue lost some hours of sleep most likely, but they’ll recover. Some local businesses did well–the soda fountain–and some, like my bakery, not so much. (This crowd seemed to prefer tacos to croissants, although they did snarf up all the peanut butter cookies. Go figure.) But most Lopezians I talked to seemed to enjoy the exposure to this chunk of mainland culture.

Any lessons learned here? Only the obvious ones: people are people. Don’t sweat the small stuff. It takes all kinds.
Sometimes cliches are cliches for a reason.

Which brings me to my question: what super-obvious but super-true cliche do you find rolling off your tongue on a regular basis? I love knowing what good ol’ phrases sustain people, so let me hear.