Gird your loins, North Beach. Here comes the fair.

This weekend's annual disruption known as the North Beach Festival is, for many of us, akin to your pushy cousin showing up on your front step, uninvited, with her suitcases and six kids in tow.

Almost everybody with deep emotional ties to North Beach has a beef with this fair, it seems.

There's the faction that opposes it because of all the drinking that goes on, especially in Washington Square. This attracted a lot of attention from on high and led to squabbling that almost deep-sixed the 2008 festival until a compromise was reached that pleased practically nobody.

Well, this is a neighborhood with plenty of bars and, so far as I know, not a single temperance hall, so that objection sounds a little like Louie, in "Casablanca," declaring hypocritically, "I'm shocked! Shocked to see that there's gambling going on in here."

I'd take the point, though, that a bunch of drunken frat boys can really kill a mood. So why help them besot? (Hint: Profit.)

Some people complain that the fair sprawls and takes over too much of the neighborhood. Until a few years ago, the North Beach Festival was confined to Upper Grant Avenue. Now Washington Square has been dragged into the mix and plenty of locals don't like their only real green space being trashed for the sake of a two-day festival. Why has it become necessary to spread out? (Hint: Profit.)

Others don't like the idea of an already crowded neighborhood becoming unbearably so. How much fun can you have, squeezed between mountains of sweaty, heaving flesh as you try wending your way down Grant Avenue hunting for a wind chime? Not much, methinks.

But, well, whatever. We deal with crowds all summer long. This is just one of the bigger ones, the price we pay for living in "one of the ten best neighborhoods in the United States" and being turned into a marketing tool by people determined to (hint) profit by it. If the cattle drive gets to you, do what I do: Beat feet out of town for the weekend. Santa Cruz is my favorite refuge, but it's nice up the coast, too. Go hang with the hippies in Bolinas for a couple of days. You think you don't like crowds?

Still others object to the North Beach Festival because they believe the head of the local chamber of commerce, one Marsha Garland, uses it as her personal cash cow. You can complete this paragraph with a sentence of your own choosing.

My particular objection to the fair, aside from its assault on Washington Square and its turning private doorways into public urinals, is that they call it the North Beach Festival at all. This is disingenuous. For the most part, there's nothing "North Beach" about it. Sure, there's the annual blessing of the animals at the Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi, which is a nice touch. There's a pizza-tossing contest and a sidewalk chalk-drawing competition, which claims Italian roots.

Other than that, it's a generic San Francisco street fair, with corporate sponsorship (Precious Cheese), corporate management (the quaintly named Team PRO Event, Inc., of Mill Valley) and outside vendors stealing business from the local bars and cafes. Whether the fair helps other businesses on the street, as its organizers claim, is an open question. A number of merchants have told me that it hurts more than it helps. A few even choose to shut down for the weekend, maybe to head for Bolinas themselves.

It's also billed as an art fair. Yes, you'll find the odd painting or two, but it's really a crafts fair of the scented-candle variety. And these "artists," by and large, are professional fair gypsies, who make their living following the circuit and can come up with the $500 fee necessary to rent booth space. That's serious coin for most of our local arteests and if a couple of them weren't good sports and ponied up, you'd never know North Beach had any working artists at all.

This makes another claim, that the North Beach Festival is a direct descendant of the first Bay Area street fair that really was an art fair – the Upper Grant Avenue Street Fair – more than a little shaky. (That earlier fair, incidentally, didn't find it necessary to sell food and drink in the streets. The surrounding establishments took care of hunger and thirst.)

When I attended the North Beach Festival a few years ago I came to the intersection of Union and Grant, arguably the fair's primo spot for a display booth. What did I spy? No little old lady in a pale blue smock hawking her watercolors, that's for sure. It was a very slick booth, indeed, featuring the "artistry" of Pella Windows.

This is a festival of commerce, pure and simple. To call it anything else, or to link it historically to a real art fair from the past, is simply dishonest. 

Maybe all this would be easier to swallow if the organizers would fess up and rename their festival the Generic San Francisco Commercial Fest, or the It-Was-the-Union-Street-Fair-Last-Week-and-Will-Be-the-Haight-Street-Fair-Next-Week Fair.

This is not to say I dislike the idea of a neighborhood festival. I just don't think making money should be the primary motivation, and any street fair worthy of the name should reflect the character of its surroundings.

All I'm asking for here is a little truth in advertising. That, and to stay the hell out of Washington Square.