Midnight In Paris Meets East Hampton 6:45 p.m. Memorial Day

Pent up expectations fueled the weekend masses as they foraged the East Hampton Farmer's Market early Saturday morning for organic mushrooms from the sleepy-eyed mushroom guy in his floppy hip hop hat and dread locks- a first stop on the trail to the quintessential weekend round up. While further on down Three Mile Harbor Road the keenest of house scouts ran reconnaissance elbowing their way through the maze of delectables at Round Swamp Farm in search of the perfect Strawberry Rhubarb Pie. This was jungle warfare disguised in Yves St. Laurent sunglasses and Tory Burch, elbows locked and iPhones ready.

Saturday afternoon painters and carpenters were still putting the finishing touches on the entrance at Club Capri over in Southampton two blocks away from Hampton Jitney's command central. But in the damp fog that blanketed County Road 39 round 11 p.m. the doors were open and a determined few lingered on the freshly painted railing taking a smoke.

By 10 p.m. Sunday night the overflow from Sen and Phao on Sag Harbor's Main Street looked like its own universe of dance club exiles not particularly phased if a table or spicy tuna roll ever materialized. Like schools of blowfish they swayed in the tide moving this way and that, hovering at the hostess stand, sticking to their kind.

So venture out we did come Monday evening ever hopeful - only to find Midnight In Paris sold out by 6:20. It had rained earlier in the day so foolishly we figured the crowds had left and a 6:45 movie would be the perfect cap to a record-breakingly popular Memorial Day Weekend. We had earned an evening to ourselves after the onslaught of Mini Coopers careening the back roads breaking the sound barrier to our otherwise silent spring. But city girls have their ways and being a guest in my own hometown - a native among them - who was I to argue, plopped 3rd row center, neck arched, soaking up Woody Allen's unabashed love poem to 1920s Paris tripping off Owen Wilson's befuddled lips? There we were planted in a sea of New Yorkers watching their favorite New York satirist spin wittily on the charms of a bygone age in this most New York of East End towns - stars in our own casting call.

A Case For Extremes

The very same weekend André Balazs launches StndAIR service in The Hamptons with his eight-passenger Cessna 208 Caravan Amphibian aircraft lighting down on Peconic Bay, replete with complimentary glasses of rose and nibbles of Swedish Fish, former East Hampton High graduates Alex Esposito and James Mirras (both 24) put their entrepreneurial heads together to launch Hamptons Free Ride, featuring a six-seater electric shuttle that will run free trips to and from village beaches.

It's the kind of over-the-top gotta-have-it immediacy The Hamptons wittingly attracts that will keep StndAIR booked at $495 a ride from Manhattan on Friday evenings, and god bless 'em that's got the dough to soar above the L.I.E., the great equalizer of the road-bound where Maserati and Honda duke it out for the HOV lane. Our vote goes to the local grads who make good on an environment loving, free-ride sharing experiment that we hope makes it passed the onslaught of Independence Day. And what brilliant branding will they engender as the entire venture is to be funded by video advertising on the back of the free seats.

For those of us who remember the early days of The Hampton Jitney when something like three bucks bought you a bike tow from the beach to the village as the brown caravans made their way from Main Beach to Main Street, you have to wonder just how far Hamptons Free Ride will take us.

The Eye Of The Beholder

For the idle visitor beauty taunts the day tripper with her must-see list of trend stops as she rushes from Jobs Lane to Newtown, eager to be among the see-and-be-seen weekend bound. Yet for the shopkeep, fairy dusting for the onslaught, this is a land of stark contrasts where deafeningly quiet mid-week afternoons this mid-May do little to bolster the bottom line as UPS deliveries pile stack high in the back room waiting for suitors.

The annual gearing up is upon us. And oh the gumption these merchants must muster to light a spark to ignite even a modest consumption from the working crowd among us, keen on keeping their own heads above water as the economy sputters its way to a half throttle. Choice rentals linger non-committal, unnervingly close to the starting bell despite talk of a sprightly Spring among brokers just a month ago as the weather hangs in mid-step between chilly damp and foggy dawn. Like reluctant suitors leaning against the porch railing feigning nonchalance, they wait.

And all that would be as it is if only it weren't so damn true to form, overflowing and then running bone dry. Too much lending and spending what wasn't ours has left a tide line of discomfort where once a spiny fortitude shouldered the off season. The boat that rocked has long since dropped anchor in search of solid bottom to latch hold - adrift still without a sail.

So come and spend your hard earned cash on the elusive beauty that promise offers. We welcome your arrival, this year more than most it seems.

Something Brilliant Comes

To those of us who grew up counting cars backed up on The Montauk Highway Sunday afternoons in late July, the season approaches with its distinct mix of aversion and mild curiosities, having to share once again our back roads and Ice Age beach line with whom ever has mustered up the consumptive gumption to snag for themselves a summer rental the price of a four-bedroom saltbox in 1972.

This year the voracious may quell their idle impulses as gasoline climbs its way to $4.44 a gallon, affording the bulk of us a kinder-gentler turn on the merry-go-round for amble we must as tourism is our stock and trade. It is early in the season yet to call it, though it was imaginable for a time when aging VWs lined Flying Point Beach, their rag tops down, that we all seemed to happily co-exist for the sheer authenticity of a Carvel and ticket to the Bridgehampton Drive-In on Thursday nights, in the days of Rigley's Steak House and James Brown at The Hotel St. James.

The monied were undetectable then and its hard to say who liked it more, they or the farmers they commiserated with at the post office counter buying 4 cent stamps. Let it be said at the onset, everything must change and in the changing rearrange one's original point of view for in as much as all that which has been turned over by developers and the newly acquired, we have broadened the provincial binoculars from which our ancestors once scoured the horizon for whales at sea. As the native among us continue to dwindle in numbers we kindle to our hybrid neighbors planting organic gardens and convincing us of the virtues of free range chicken eggs, original farmers we.

Who is to say - in the middle of this wild experiment where culture and landscape make odd bedfellows of us all - as we swap text messages on line at the movie theater and vie for the same parking spaces on Main Street, that something unexpectedly brilliant this way comes?