A festival that started as a joke is the most Denton thing in Denton

This year the headliners are stars reborn. Dentonites Deep Blue Something made Breakfast at Tiffany’s a ’90s earworm, and if you’ve been able to shake that worm out of your ear since then, I tip my hat to you. Speaking of hats, Carl Finch’s Space Helmet is next on the bill, a reference to the leader of Brave Combo, the beloved polka act who are the house band at most of Denton’s auspicious events.

There’s more to it than musical guests.

“In style, it’s still very much a variety show, so everything from a wrestling exhibition to a skateboard demo to metal bands … we even have the pastor of the Unitarian church to bless the audience,” Liechty said. At 37, he has lived in Denton for almost 20 years.

“Moved in ’03 into West Hall on Campus, and just stuck around,” he said. Playing around town as DJ YeahDef, he’s a cult figure in Denton in his own right.

Like the original event, Dentonpalooza Twoza is a piece of festival poster art in addition to a happening.

This poster delves even deeper into local lore as a cryptic collage of small-town eccentricities. It’s a kind of folk history primer on Denton, name-checking obscure ’90s garage-sale performance art, the sweetest vacuum-repairing lady in the world, and a “half-fast” marching band organized by a skull-measuring group. Part of the fun is guessing which of the legends will grace the stage, and which will remain absurdist poster comedy.

“It’s all kind of colloquially passed information, and that’s by intention,” Liechty said. “You wouldn’t know what a lot of these things were if you weren’t in town talking about them.”

To be a Dentonite is to dig these legends.

Flat Earth Guy is the only act to reappear on the poster, and he’s not even acting. The man believes that “sea level is level” so intensely that he advertises it on the exterior wall of his house. Flat Earth Guy’s beat-up hatchback car plastered with anti-geoid propaganda is such a fixture on the town square that there could be an entirely separate conspiracy theory about how he gets such a good parking spot.

Other legendary figures are more obscure.

There’s the Pricemaster, a fake robot who oversaw a garage sale created by UNT students as a performance art piece. Whenever someone asked how much a given item was, the robot interjected exorbitant figures like “ONE MILLION DOLLARS!” (Unfortunately, the original Pricemaster has passed away, but Liechty is hoping someone will appear in the Flash Gordon-adjacent costume.)

There’s the XCW Wrestling team, which put on regular shows around Denton in the late aughts, starting gigs with rock music before segueing into body-slamming. Liechty liked the mix, and reached out to one of the founders, trying to hire him out of retirement like a Clint Eastwood character in an old western.

“Do you still have your ring?” Liechty asked.

“Yeah, it’s in storage.”

The most quintessentially Denton thing of all might be to have a wrestling ring in your storage unit.

Liechty hasn’t drawn up the schedule yet, but the wrestling will help kick the event off, coming before sunset.

“It feels like a daytime thing to me,” Liechty said.

Also on the bill are two legends from either side of Locust Street, one block north of the square. There, you can have an old appliance repaired at Denton Discount Vacuums, which was less mom-and-pop and more grandmom-and-grandpop for many years. Since her husband, Roy, died in 2020, Joyce Harris has run the store that they opened together in 1968 solo.

“When I close, there probably won’t be nobody else around that does it,” Harris said.

You could then wheel your newly mended vacuum across the street to eat at Keiichi’s world-class Japanese fusion restaurant. Be warned: Keiichi, the jovial chef-owner, has a very Denton way of doing business. He abandoned the high-stress world of Houston haute cuisine and bought a building that looks more like an insurance office than a restaurant from the outside. There’s only seating for about 20 people in the whole joint, and it’s got a national reputation. So most booking phone calls go something like this: “November? No nothing in November. How about November 2023?”

Some of the most abstract-sounding names on the bill might be performing. Last year a woman in a head-to-toe rat suit represented the urban myths around the rough “Murder Kroger.” Denton’s grocery stores are defined by their vibe. This year, the poster celebrates a different Kroger with a slightly lurid nickname connoting the primped, affluent female clientele. Next year, it could be the turn of the “cheese Kroger.”

Last year, there were goats. This year, Liechty is “pivoting” to cats, sharks and food fights. There’s a possible appearance from the gray Russian blue Tarzan, although Rubber Gloves is a few blocks from the free-roaming cat’s usual haunts around the square.

Like any great promoter, Liechty is opportunistic with talent signing. He ran into his neighbor Aaron Powell, a successful contestant on the Shark Tank reality show, riding around on one of his cargo-bearing front-loading bikes, and soon added the cyclist, the vehicle and a shark costume to the bill.

“‘Hey Aaron , I’ve got a crazy idea for you,’” Liechty remembered. “His exact words were ‘I love crazy ideas.’”

In a nod to the influencer age, TikTok star and Twitter comedienne Megan Bitchell will oversee a hot-dog eating contest.

A relatively new Denton favorite, Gnome Cones, where orders are called out in helium-inflected voices, has donated 500 unflavored snow cones. The chef from Boca 31, one of the most innovative Latin American joints in North Texas, will bring burritos for smashing in what Liechty anticipates will be a lively food fight.

Another legend name-checked on the poster, the Chairy Orchard, is close to Liechty’s heart. The 7-year-old garden is the brainchild of two pun-loving neighbors and features dozens of chairs in their adjoining backyard.

“It’s kind of interesting … a joke made manifest in real life … they thought the pun was so funny they just decided to make it happen,” Liechty said.

Austinites may be trying to keep their city weird; Denton’s weirdness seems less intentional — the low-budget, off-kilter, as-a-joke version of civic wackiness, which is better in my opinion.

“Denton is very pro-silly stuff for no reason. Myself included. Maybe too much,” Liechty said. “That’s why I’ve dedicated something like two years of my life to this!”

Rob Curran is a writer in Denton and a frequent contributor to The Dallas Morning News.